Quotes from Bayard Taylor

I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it. Since being here, I have read the accounts of several travellers, and in many cases the devotional rhapsodies - the ecstacies of awe and reverence - in which they indulge, strike me as forced and affected.

In the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites.

The nearest approach I have ever seen to the symmetry of ancient sculpture was among the Arab tribes of Ethiopia. Our Saxon race can supply the athlete, but not the Apollo.

Higher than the perfect song For which love longeth, Is the tender fear of wrong, That never wrongeth.

I love thee, I love but theeWith a love that shall not dieTill the sun grows cold, And the stars grow old

Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold.

'Really,' thought I, 'we call Baltimore the 'Monumental City' for its two marble columns, and here is Edinburg with one at every street-corner!'

I envy those old Greek bathers, into whose hands were delivered Pericles, and Alcibiades, and the perfect models of Phidias. They had daily before their eyes the highest types of Beauty which the world has ever produced; for of all things that are beautiful, the human body is the crown.

By wisdom wealth is won; but riches purchased wisdom yet for none.

The stream from Wisdom's well, Which God supplies, is inexhaustible.

Opportunity is rare, and a wise man will never let it go by him.

The history of Germany is not the history of a nation, but of a race. It has little unity, therefore; it is complicated, broken, and attached on all sides to the histories of other countries.

Above Coblentz almost every mountain has a ruin and a legend. One feels everywhere the spirit of the past, and its stirring recollections come back upon the mind with irresistible force.

Swelling in anger or sparkling in glee.

I was pleasantly disappointed on entering Bohemia. Instead of a dull, uninteresting country, as I expected, it is a land full of the most lovely scenery. There is every thing which can gratify the eye - high blue mountains, valleys of the sweetest pastoral look and romantic old ruins.

So far as female beauty is concerned, the Circassian women have no superiors. They have preserved in their mountain home the purity of the Grecian models, and still display the perfect physical loveliness, whose type has descended to us in the Venus de Medici.

Could one live on the sense of beauty alone, exempt from the necessity of 'creature comforts,' a sea-voyage would be delightful.

The view of the Rocky Mountains from the Divide near Kiowa Creek is considered one of the finest in Colorado.

The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring.

From the desert I come to thee, On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire.

Those who would attain to any marked degree of excellence in a chosen pursuit must work, and work hard for it, prince or peasant.

To Truth's house there is a single door, which is experience.