109 Quotes by Thomas Wolfe

Fields are won by those who believe in the winning.

So, then, to every man his chance--to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity--to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him--this, seeker, is the promise of America.

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

As it had alway done, the movement and experience of the train, filled him whith a sense of triumph, joy and luxury.

The train itself is a miracle of man's handiwork, and everything about it is eloquent of human purpose and direction..

One feels the brakes go on when the train is coming to a river, and one knows that the old gloved hand of cunning is at the throttle. One's own sense of manhood and mastery is heightened by being on a train.

The train gives one a feeling of wild and lonely joy, a sense of the savage, unfenced, and illimitable wilderness of the country through which the train is rushing, a wordless and unutterable hope, as one thinks of the enchanted city toward which he is speeding the unbroken and fabulous promise of the life he is to find there.

Death the last voyage, the longest and the best.

I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.