Thomas Starr King Quotes:

The spirit of a person's life is ever shedding some power, just as a flower is steadily bestowing fragrance upon the air.

Topics: Inspiring, Flower, Air

By cultivating an interest in a few good books which contain the result of the toil or the quintessence of the genius of some of the most gifted thinkers of the world, we need not live on the marsh and in the mists. The slopes and ridges invite us.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1880). “Christianity and Humanity ...: Ed., with a Memoir”

Topics: Book, Needs, Genius, Cultivating

Nature never writes a blind hand.

Topics: Writing, Hands, Blind, Physiognomy

The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color, is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1864). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.178

Topics: Gay, Thoughtful, Men, Pensive, Thoughtful Mind

Great eloquence we cannot get, except from human genius.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1864). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.59

Topics: Genius, Eloquence, Humans

Nature is hieroglyphic. Each prominent fact in it is like a type; its final use is to set up one letter of the infinite alphabet, and help us by its connections to read some statement or statute applicable to the conscious world.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1864). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.394

Topics: Nature, Finals, Use, Hieroglyphics

Be sure of the foundation of your life. Know why you live as you do. Be ready to give a reason for it. Do not, in such a matter as life, build an opinion or custom on what you guess is true. Make it a matter of certainty and science.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1924). “Socrates: An Oration”

Topics: Life, Giving, Matter

Leaves are the Greek, flowers the Italian, phase of the spirit of beauty that reveals itself through the flora of the globe.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1866). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.306

Topics: Flower, Italian, Greek, Flora

Though I weigh only 120 pounds, when I'm mad, I weigh a ton.

Topics: Mad, Pounds

What a privilege it is to be an American!

source: - Thomas Starr King (1924). “Socrates: An Oration”

Topics: Privilege

The oak roars when a high wind wrestles with it; the beech shrieks; the elm sends forth a long, deep groan; the ash pours out moans of thrilling anguish.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1866). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.91

Topics: Wind, Long, Ashes, Long Deep

It is strange. I see all the privileges and greatness of the future. It already looks grand, beautiful. Tell them I went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully.

Topics: Beautiful, Greatness, Looks

A visit to New Hampshire supplies the most resources to a traveler, and confers the most benefit on the mind and taste, when it lifts him above mere appetite for wildness, ruggedness, and the feeling of mass and precipitous elevation, into a perception and love of the refined grandeur, the chaste sublimity, the airy majesty overlaid with tender and polished bloom, in which the landscape splendor of a noble mountain lies.

source: - Thomas Starr King (1876). “The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape, and Poetry”, p.6

Topics: Lying, Feelings, Mind, Sublimity, New Hampshire