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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The original home of the Aryan race appears to have been somewhere among the mountains and lofty table-lands of Central Asia. The word ‘Arya,’ meaning the high or the excellent, indicates their superiority over the neighboring races long before the beginning of history. Bayard Taylor Read Quote
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 Read Quote
An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered. Bayard Taylor Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Fame is what you have taken, character is what you give; when to this truth you waken then you begin to live. Bayard Taylor Read Quote