Quotes from Hugh Miller

The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark loft, because I was a man, and could think and imagine.

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings.

But the advice was not taken - Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear - though I failed to trace his after history - that he suffered in consequence.

Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music he had ever heard.

Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wilderness.

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

My schoolfellows were mostly stiff, illiterate lads, who, with a little bad Latin and worse Greek, plumed themselves mightily on their scholarship; and I had little inducement to form any intimacies among them; for, of all men, the ignorant scholar is the least amusing.

I was directed by the coachman to by far the most splendid temperance coffee-house I had ever seen: but it seemed too fine a lodging-house for harbouring the more characteristic English and I had not crossed the Border to see cosmopolites...