Bayard Quotes & Sayings

Wrapped in his sad-colored cloak, the Day, like a Puritan, standeth
Stern in the joyless fields, rebuking the lingering color,
Dying hectic of leaves and the chilly blue of the asters,
Hearing, perchance, the croak of a crow on the desolate tree-top. — Bayard Taylor

Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it. There are three ways in which one can deal with an injustice. (a) One can accept it without protest. (b) On can seek to avoid it. (c) One can resist the injustice non-violently. To accept it is to perpetuate it. — Bayard Rustin

Surely, I must at all times attempt to obey the law of the state. But when the will of God and the will of the state conflict, I am compelled to follow the will of God. — Bayard Rustin

When May, with cowslip-braided locks,
Walks through the land in green attire.
And burns in meadow-grass the phlox
His torch of purple fire:
And when the punctual May arrives,
With cowslip-garland on her brow,
We know what once she gave our lives,
And cannot give us now! — Bayard Taylor

The hollows are heavy and dank
With the steam of the Goldenrods. — Bayard Taylor

A Pike, in the California dialect, is a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois. The first emigrants that came over the plains were from Pike County, Missouri; but as the phrase, 'a Pike County man,' was altogether too long for this short life of ours, it was soon abbreviated into 'a Pike.' — Bayard Taylor

Although Damascus is considered the oldest city in the world, the date of its foundation going beyond tradition, there are very few relics of antiquity in or near it. — Bayard Taylor

For reasons I have yet to define, Signor Arpelli stood out from his colleagues. The curled brim of his hat, perhaps. A certain mingling of gravity and levity- I thought the masks of Janus had merged in his eyes. — Louis Bayard

London has the advantage of one of the most gloomy atmospheres in the world. — Bayard Taylor

Women are not apt to be won by the charms of verse. — Bayard Taylor

Love is a fire that can nurture or destroy, but you can't tell which until you surrender to the flames. — Clara Bayard

Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight. — Bayard Rustin

My activism did not spring from being black ... The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family. — Bayard Rustin

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. — Bayard Taylor

The more I see of the Swedes, the more I am convinced that there is no kinder, simpler, and honester people in the world. — Bayard Taylor

[ ... ] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written. — Pierre Bayard

As I toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me. — 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. — Bayard Taylor

Sometimes an hour of Fate's serenest weather Strikes through our changeful sky its coming beams; Somewhere above us, in elusive ether, Waits the fulfilment of our dearest dreams. — Bayard Taylor

The loving are the daring. — Bayard Taylor

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. — Herbert Bayard Swope

The real radical is that person who has a vision of equality and is willing to do those things that will bring reality closer to that vision ... — Bayard Rustin

Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale. — Susan Hill

He's a rather brilliant defensive tactician," Grimm said. "I agree," Bayard said. "The problem is that he's an inept defensive strategist. — Jim Butcher

If I do not fight bigotry wherever it is, bigotry is thereby strengthened. And to the degree that it is strengthened, it will, thereby, have the power to turn on me. — Bayard Rustin

My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me. — Bayard Rustin

Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings. — Bayard Rustin

Every indifference to prejudice is suicide because, if I don't fight all bigotry, bigotry itself will be strengthened and, sooner or later, it will return on me. — Bayard Rustin

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. — Bayard Taylor

There is more than one way not to read, the most radical of which is not to open a book at all. For any given reader, however dedicated he might be, such total abstention necessarily holds true for virtually everything that has been published, and thus in fact this constitutes our primary way of relating to books. We must not forget that even a prodigious reader never has access to more than an infinitesimal fraction of the books that exist. — Pierre Bayard

Peace the offspring is of Power. — Bayard Taylor

The Swedish language combines the strong manhood of the German with the delicate beauty of the Italian. — Bayard Taylor

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. — Bayard Taylor

God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying. — Bayard Rustin

Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin to live. — Bayard Taylor

The native Jewish families in Jerusalem, as well as those in other parts of Palestine, present a marked difference to the Jews of Europe and America. They possess the same physical characteristics - the dark, oblong eye, the prominent nose, the strongly-marked cheek and jaw - but in the latter, these traits have become harsh and coarse. — Bayard Taylor

People can't see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler. — Bayard Taylor

The bravest are the most tender; the loving are the daring. — Bayard Taylor

The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one. — Bayard Rustin

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own. — Bayard Taylor

I know I am
that simplest bliss
The millions of my brothers miss.
I know the fortune to be born,
Even to the meanest wretch they scorn. — Bayard Taylor

There may come a day
Which crowns Desire with gift, and Art with truth,
And Love with bliss, and Life with wiser youth! — Bayard Taylor

When an individual is protesting society's refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him. — Bayard Rustin

if you want to be able to talk about a place, the best thing to do is stay at home. — Pierre Bayard

Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of *not* picking up and *not* opening all the other books in the universe. — Pierre Bayard

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. — Bayard Taylor

The moral man is he who is opposed to injustice per se, opposed to injustice wherever he finds it; the moral man looks for injustice first of all in himself. — Bayard Rustin

I'm a solitary sort, I get chaffed by too many elbows. — Louis Bayard

Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught. — Pierre Bayard

Since Israel is a democratic state surrounded by essentially undemocratic states which have sworn her destruction, those interested in democracy everywhere must support Israel's existence. — Bayard Rustin

Walking at random through the streets, we came by chance upon the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I shall long remember my first impression of the scene within. The lofty gothic ceiling arched far above my head and through the stained windows the light came but dimly - it was all still, solemn and religious. — Bayard Taylor

(in which, along with Montaigne, we raise the question of whether a book you have read and completely forgotten, and which you have even forgotten you have read, is still a book you have read) — Pierre Bayard

The first duty of a newspaper is to be accurate. If it be accurate, it follows that it is fair. — Herbert Bayard Swope

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality. — Bayard Rustin

Swelling in anger or sparkling in glee. — Bayard Taylor

I came to Berlin not to visit its museums and galleries, its operas, its theaters ... but for the sake of seeing and speaking with the world's greatest living man - Alexander von Humboldt. — Bayard Taylor

Learn to live, and live to learn,
Ignorance like a fire doth burn,
Little tasks make large return. — Bayard Taylor

But still I dream that somewhere there must be
The spirit of a child that waits for me. — Bayard Taylor

But who will watch my lilies, When their blossoms open white? By day the sun shall be sentry, And the moon and the stars by night! — Bayard Taylor

Pansies in soft April rains Fill their stalks with honeyed sap Drawn from Earth's prolific lap. — Bayard Taylor

What we are able to say about our intimate relation with a book will have more force if we have not thought about it excessively. Instead, we need only let our unconscious express itself within us and give voice, in this privileged moment of openness in language, to the secret ties that bind us to the book, and therefore to ourselves. — Pierre Bayard

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts. — Bayard Rustin

The Poet's leaves are gathered one by one,
In the slow process of the doubtful years. — Bayard Taylor

Alone each heart must cover up its dead; Alone, through bitter toil, achieve its rest. — Bayard Taylor

Love's humility is love's true pride. — Bayard Taylor

The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in - a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom to not end his journey there. — Pierre Bayard

Verily there is nothing in all Europe so beautiful as Valldemosa. — Bayard Taylor

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon. — Bayard Rustin

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

The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don't turn — Bayard Rustin

Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation. — Bayard Taylor

I love thee, I love but thee,
With a love that shall not die
Till the sun grows cold,
And the stars are old — Bayard Taylor

Death is not rare, alas! nor burials few,
And soon the grassy coverlet of God
Spreads equal green above their ashes pale. — Bayard Taylor

Luther King gave people "the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be," Bayard Rustin said - in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield. — Robert A. Caro

Pens carry further than rifled cannon. — Bayard Taylor

Mock jewelry on a woman is tangible vulgarity. — Bayard Taylor

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. — Bayard Taylor

I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it. — Bayard Taylor

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

Voluptuous bloom and fragrance rare The summer to its rose may bring; Far sweeter to the wooing air The hidden violet of spring. Still, still that lovely ghost appears, Too fair, too pure, to bid depart; No riper love of later years Can steal its beauty from the heart. — Bayard Taylor

There is a degree of confidence exhibited towards strangers in Sweden, especially in hotels, at post-stations, and on board the inland steamers, which tells well for the general honesty of the people. — Bayard Taylor

Oh! what waves of crime and bloodshed have swept like the waves of a deluge down the valley of the Rhine! War has laid his mailed hand on those desolate towers and ruthlessly torn down what time has spared, yet he could not mar the beauty of the shore, nor could Time himself hurl down the mountains that guard it. — Bayard Taylor

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. — Bayard Taylor

The barometer for judging the character of people, in regard human rights, is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian. The judgment as to whether you can trust the future, the social advancement - depending on people - will be judged on where they come out on that question. — Bayard Rustin

When we talk about books ... we are talking about our approximate recollections of books ... What we preserve of the books we read - whether we take notes or not, and even if we sincerely believe we remember them faithfully - is in truth no more than a few fragments afloat, like so many islands, on an ocean of oblivion ... We do not retain in memory complete books identical to the books remembered by everyone else, but rather fragments surviving from partial readings, frequently fused together and further recast by our private fantasies. ... What we take to be the books we have read is in fact an anomalous accumulation of fragments of texts, reworked by our imagination and unrelated to the books of others, even if these books are materially identical to ones we have held in our hands. — Pierre Bayard

The title of the work, its place in the collective library, the nature of the person who tells us about it, the atmosphere established in the written or spoken exhange, among many other instances, offer alternatives to the book itself that allow us to talk about ourselves without dwelling upon the work too closely. — Pierre Bayard

The lamp you lighted in the olden time Will show you my heart's-blood beating through the rhyme: A poet's journal, writ in fire and tears ... Then slow deliverance, with the gaps of years ... — Bayard Taylor

Such a nice little pastiche. Of course, a true Elizbethan theater wouldn't have a roof, would it? Or such comfortable chairs. All the same quite charming.I wonder what play they're putting on now?
Oh, its ... Love's Labour Lost.
Well, isn't that apropos?
Is it?
I wonder if it's modern dress. No, I don't wonder at all.On that particular question, I have been quite driven from the firld. Everywhere one goes now it's Uzis at Agincourt, Imogen in jeans, the Thane of Cawdor in a three-button suit. Nest thing you know, Romeo and Julie will simply text each other. Damn the balcony. OMG,Romeo. ILY 24-7. — Louis Bayard

I believe in social dislocation and creative trouble. — Bayard Rustin

A great number of elements in the characters' lives, both psychic and factual, are not communicated to us. [ ... ] These characters, I believe, enjoy a much greater autonomy than we usually think, and are able to take initiatives unknown both to the writer and the reader. When characters have their own will, their own autonomy, it gives the literary universe a greater internal mobility; it also makes the texts through which we view this world all the more open and incomplete. — Pierre Bayard

For decades, this great leader, often at Dr. King's side, was denied his rightful place in history because he was openly gay. No medal can change that, but today, we honor Bayard Rustin's memory by taking our place in his march towards true equality, no matter who we are or who we love. — Barack Obama

The clouds are scudding across the moon,
A misty light is on the sea;
The wind in the shrouds has a wintry tune,
And the foam is flying free. — Bayard Taylor

True, when you behold Damascus from the Salahiyeh, the last slope of the Anti-Lebanon, it is the realization of all that you have dreamed of Oriental splendor; the world has no picture more dazzling. It is Beauty carried to the Sublime, as I have felt when overlooking some boundless forest of palms within the tropics. — Bayard Taylor

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

And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens, Are singing the selfsame strain. — Bayard Taylor

I'm a man of a certain age - old enough to have been every kind of fool- and I find to my surprise that the only counsel I have to pass on is this: Never let your name be found in a dead man's trousers. — Louis Bayard

I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war. — Bayard Rustin

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

To speak without shame about books we haven't read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for we can strive toward this image for a lifetime without ever managing to coincide with it. — Pierre Bayard

The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race - a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes. — Bayard Taylor