Inspirational Quotes by Byron J. Rees
“But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow.”
“We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.”
“Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground, between them.”
“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times”
topics: classics
“It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.”
“Warum leben wir in solcher Hast, mit solcher Vergeudung von Leben? Wir glauben, Hungers zu sterben, bevor wir hungrig sind. Es heißt, "ein Stich zur rechten Zeit erspart neun andere" - also werden lieber gleich tausend Stiche gemacht, um neun für den nächsten Tag zu ersparen.”
“So much for a blind obedience to a blundering oracle, throwing the stones over their heads behind them, and not seeing where they fell.”
“I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe, for this sandy overflow is something such a foliaceous mass as the vitals of the animal body.”
“Some of you, we all know, are poor, find it hard to live, are sometimes, as it were, gasping for breath.”
“If some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.”
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest. Some”
“I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead.”
“Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
“If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.”
“Genius is not a retainer to any emperor, or is its material silver, or gold, or marble, except to a trifling extent.”
topics: genius
“This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.”
“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and threw them out the window in disgust. How, then, could I have a furnished house? I would rather sit in the open air, for no dust gathers on the grass, unless where man has broken ground.”
“When I ask for a garment of a particular form, my tailoress tells me gravely, "They do not make them so now," not emphasizing the "They" at all, as if she quoted an authority as impersonal as the Fates, and I find it difficult to get made what I want, simply because she cannot believe that I mean what I say, that I am so rash. When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it, that I may find out by what degree of consanguinity They are related to me, and what authority they may have in an affair which affects me so nearly; and, finally, I am inclined to answer her with equal mystery, and without any more emphasis of the "they"—"It is true, they did not make them so recently, but they do now." Of what use this measuring of me if she does not measure my character, but only the breadth of my shoulders, as it were a peg to bang the coat on?”
“Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.”
Group of Brands
© 2026 Bibleportal.com All rights reserved.
Byron J. Rees was born at Westfield, Indiana to parents of ministers in the Society of Friends. When he was five years of age they moved to Walnut Ridge, Indiana, where there was a Friends' meeting of more than ordinary size and activity. It was there that his conversion took place.