Quotes from James Fenimore Cooper

One, and she was the more juvenile in her appearance, though both were young, permitted glimpses of her dazzling complexion, fair golden hair, and bright blue eyes, to be caught, as she artlessly suffered the morning air to blow aside the green veil which descended low from her beaver.

Even the robin and the martin come back, year after year, to their old nests; shall a woman be less true hearted than a bird?

for flowers that will bloom in a garden will die on a heath...

All places that the eye of heaven visits/ Are to a wise man ports and happy havens:/ Think not the king did banish thee:/ But thou the king. --Richard II

They linger yet,      Avengers of their native land.—Gray

Say to these kind and gentle females, that a heart-broken and failing man returns them his thanks. Tell them, that the Being we all worship, under different names, will be mindful of their charity; and that the time shall not be distant when we may assemble around His throne without distinction of sex, or rank, or color. The

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily, for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

Men are seldom struck by incongruities in their appearance any more than their own conduct.

A thing which is of no moment itself may be made of importance in the way of competition.

if a man believed all that other people choose to say in their own favor, he might get an oversized opinion of them, and an undersized opinion of himself.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than any existence of mediocrity.

His roving eyes began to moisten, and before the hymn was ended, scalding tears rolled out of a fountain that had long seemed dry, and followed each other down those cheeks that had oftener felt the storms of heaven, than any testimonials of weakness.

Hardship! 'tis a pleasure, children, and the greatest that is left me on this side the grave.

Men who, in their hearts, really care no more for mankind than See-wise cared for the fish, lift their voices in shouts of a spurious humanity, in order to raise themselves to power, on the shoulders of an excited populace. Bloodshed, domestic violence, impracticable efforts to attain an impossible perfection, and all the evils of a civil conflict are forgotten or blindly attempted, in order to raise themselves in the arms of those they call the people.

Come, friend; you are welcome, though your notions are a little blinded with reading too many books.

I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized...

Nothing is really patriotic, however, that is not strictly true and just; any more than it is paternal love to undermine the constitution of a child by an indiscriminate indulgence in pernicious diet.

Life is sweet, even to the aged; and, for that matter, I've known some that seemed to set much store by it when it got to be of the least value.

Había en él toda la majestuosidad, sencilla y grande a la voz, de una criatura primitiva, no muy alterada por la corrupción que a menudo acompaña a las costumbres civilizadas, pero que, como don natural, posee los dotes mejores de un ser humano.

Where are the blossoms of those summers!-fallen, one by one: so all of my family departed, each in his turn, to the land of the spirits.

But even the falsest of men pay so much homage to truth as to seem its votaries.

that all-seeing eye which reads the heart, could not fail to discriminate between the living and the dead, and the gentle soul of the unfortunate girl was already far removed beyond the errors, or deceptions, of any human ritual.

?uo sam ve? šumu gdje jau?e poput ?ovjeka koji se na?e u nevolji; slušao sam kako vjetar pjeva svoju pjesmu me?u granjem drve?a; slušao sam munju kako praska poput upaljena grmlja, kad bljuje iskre i rašljaste plamenove, i sve mi se to ?inilo tek kao volja Onoga koji drži sve stvari u svojoj ruci.

If mankind conversed only of the things they understood, half the words might be struck out of the dictionaries.