Henry Stephens Salt Quotes & Sayings

One cannot walk in such regions, consciously
without enlargement of thought. There are
heights and valleys which, to those who seek
them in a sympathetic spirit, are better
" seats of learning " than any school or university in the land ; there are days when the climber seems to rise into a rarer mental as well as visual atmosphere, and to leave far below him the crass cares and prejudices of commonplace life. — Henry Stephens Salt

It is beyond doubt that the chief motive of Vegetarianism is the humane one. Questions of hygiene and of economy both play their part, and an important part, in a full discussion of food reform; but the feeling which underlies and animates the whole movement is the instinctive horror of butchery, especially the butchery of the more highly organized animals, so human, so near akin to man. — Henry Stephens Salt

The animals you say were 'sent' for man's free use and nutriment. Pray, then, inform me, and be candid, why came they aeons before man did, to spend long centuries on earth. Awaiting their devourer's birth? Those ill-timed chattels, sent from heaven, were, sure, the maddest gift e'er given - 'sent' for man's use (can man believe it?) when there was no man to receive it! — Henry Stephens Salt

Here, if nowhere else in the land, the sense of satiety is unknown; and it is to this mental tonic, even more than to the bracing air of the heights, that we owe the unwearied spirit which nerves us to walk more leagues upon the mountains than we could walk miles upon the plain. For in the lowlands we walk with the body only; in the highlands we walk with the mind — Henry Stephens Salt

I advance no exaggerated or fanciful claim for Vegetarianism. It is not, as some have asserted, a "panacea" for human ills; it is something much more rational
an essential part of the modern humanitarian movement, which can make no true progress without it. Vegetarianism is the diet of the future, as flesh-food is the diet of the past. — Henry Stephens Salt

I shall die ... as I have lived, rationalist, socialist, pacifist, and humanitarian. — Henry Stephens Salt

Religion has never befriended the cause of humaneness. Its monstrous doctrine of eternal punishment and the torture of the damned underlies much of the barbarity with which man has treated man; and the deep division imagined by the Church between the human being, with his immortal soul, and the soulless "beasts", has been responsible for an incalculable sum of cruelty. — Henry Stephens Salt

I send thee, love, this upland flower I found
While wandering lonely with o'erclouded heart,
Hid in a grey recess of rocky ground
Among the misty mountains far apart;
And then I heard the wild wind's luring sound
Which whoso trusts, is healed of earthborn care,
And watched the lofty ridges loom around,
Yet yearned in vain their secret faith to share.
When lo! the sudden sunlight, sparkling keen,
Poured full upon the vales this glorious day,
And bared the abiding mountain-tops serene,
And swept the shifting vapour-wreaths away:
Then with the hills' true heart my heart beat true,
Heavens opened, cloud-thoughts vanished, and I knew. — Henry Stephens Salt