Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

The virtue of the country is that it makes you thirsty for the city.

A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

There is a city myth that country life was isolated and lonely; the truth is that farmers and their families then had a richer social life than they have now. They enjoyed a society organic, satisfying and whole, not mixed and thinned with the life of town, city and nation as it now is.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.

The sound universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there's a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of night the dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters.

City life is no life for a country man; for such a man that life is a kind of damnation in itself.

The written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here. It was a sluggish country.

Once wealth and beauty are gone, there is always rural life.

I'm a city girl and I never really lived in the country, so I'm learning about that.

No wise man will go to live in the country, unless he has something to do which can be better done in the country. For instance, if he is to shut himself up for a year to study science, it is better to look out to the fields, than to an opposite wall. Then, if a man walks out in the country, there is nobody to keep him from walking in again: but if a man walks out in London, he is not sure when he will walk in again. A great city is, to be sure, the school for studying life.

It is more a mentality than the actual places people live, as Jefferson and Hamilton would argue about - city versus country. For example, someone could have an empty place mentality yet be living in a condo in Boca Raton.

The city does not take away, neither does the country give, solitude; solitude is within us.

He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so he could live in the country.

I've learned over the years that geography is not that important, except that I seem to work better in the country than the city. I get more done. There's just less happening around me, and I have more time and concentration to work on music.

The city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.

Country people tend to consider that they have a corner on righteousness and to distrust most manifestations of cleverness, while people in the city are leery of righteousness but ascribe to themselves all manner of cleverness.

A home in the country is what a city man hopes to buy and a farmer hopes to sell.

The country is the place for children, and if not the country, a city small enough so that one can get out into the country.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

I do not think I exaggerate the importance or the charms of pedestrianism, or our need as a people to cultivate the art. I think it would tend to soften the national manners, to teach us the meaning of leisure, to acquaint us with the charms of the open air, to strengthen and foster the tie between the race and the land. No one else looks out upon the world so kindly and charitably as the pedestrian; no one else gives and takes so much from the country he passes through.

Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and civil rights of this country, and yet it was dying and didn't see it, except for some sociologist at Wayne State University who predicted that Detroit was losing population by a half-million by the end of that '60s decade, and that that trend would continue taking away its tax base.

Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape.

I decided this early on at Justice: if the traditional way was the most effective way of doing something, then we'd maintain it. But if it was not functioning at optimum levels, we would be doing the country a disservice by continuing to do things "like we've always done them."

You got to do more than just live in the country to be a Farmer.