Qquoteatlas.infoquotes, sources and meanings
Quote reference and discovery

Find the words — and understand where they came from.

Search quotations by topic, author, book, speech or idea. Each quotation keeps its source context and an original explanation nearby.

Popular topics

Start with well-developed collections

See the full A–Z →
Author & topic collections

Explore a specific idea within one author

Inside every quotation

Words, source, meaning and related ideas stay connected

Source identified
“It was a ride of nearly thirty miles, and of many hours, one of the most splendid I ever took.”

Bird remembers the long ride as splendid because distance, physical exertion and the Rocky Mountain landscape combine into an unusually vivid firsthand travel experience.

Source note: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, Letter IX, Project Gutenberg #755. Bird is describing a nearly thirty-mile cattle-drive ride in Colorado and immediately recounts difficult terrain, streams, lakes and mountain views; this is historical travel narrative, not present-day route or safety guidance.

Source identified
“The traveller must be born again on the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him.”

Thoreau presents serious travel as a demanding experience that changes the traveller through exposure, effort and direct encounter with conditions beyond ordinary comfort.

Source note: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thursday, Project Gutenberg #4232. The sentence follows Thoreau’s claim that sincere travelling is no pastime and precedes his description of weariness, sore feet and experience acquired on the road; it is nineteenth-century travel philosophy rather than practical safety advice.

Source identified
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.”

Stevenson values movement and lived experience as ends in themselves, making the act of travelling more important here than reaching a prestigious destination.

Source note: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, “Cheylard and Luc,” Project Gutenberg #535. Stevenson follows the sentence by calling movement “the great affair” and describing the physical needs and difficulties of the road; it is literary travel reflection, not contemporary destination guidance.

Source identified
“What is now proved was once only imagined.”

Blake’s proverb compresses a recurring imaginative pattern: possibilities can exist first as conceived ideas before later work, discovery or demonstration makes some of them real or provable.

Source note: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell,” represented by Project Gutenberg #45315 at printed page 16. Gutenberg regularizes the line to “imagined”; Blake’s engraved text is often transcribed with historical spelling and punctuation. The proverb is part of Blake’s deliberately paradoxical infernal-wisdom sequence, not a literal claim that every imagined thing will eventually be proved.

Source identified
“The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.”

Shelley treats imagination as the capacity that lets a person move beyond a narrow private viewpoint and enter the pains and pleasures of others, with poetry strengthening that sympathetic faculty.

Source note: A Defence of Poetry, written in 1821 and first published posthumously in 1840. The represented wording is verified in Project Gutenberg #5428 and the standalone Wikisource transcription; the immediately preceding sentences define moral imagination through identification with other people rather than through fantasy alone.

Source identified
“A child should not be ordered about, but should be just as courteously addressed as a grown person in order that he may learn courtesy.”

Key argues that respectful treatment is itself part of teaching respectful conduct: adults model the courtesy they expect children to learn rather than relying only on commands.

Source note: The Century of the Child, Chapter III, “Education,” Francis Maro translation revised by the author, Project Gutenberg #57283, printed page 130. The sentence belongs to Key’s early-twentieth-century reform pedagogy; nearby prescriptions are historically situated and are not imported into this collection as current child-safety or clinical guidance.

01

Keep the source visible

A named work, speech, poem, letter or traditional text gives readers something concrete to inspect.

02

Add useful explanation

Meaning notes help explain the idea without simply repeating the quotation.

03

Compare different voices

Broad topics become clearer when readers can compare authors, works and time periods.