Human habitation

“ Who is there amongst us that has not felt, in walking through the rooms of some uninhabited house, with every appliance of human comfort strewn about, ease and luxury within, wavy trees and sloping lawn or eddying waters without—who, in seeing all these, has not questioned himself as to why this should be deserted? ”

“ These public houses are as essential to our social life and development as the private house is to our physical existence.
Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death; outside the home are agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, transportation, art, science, and religion. Every human—i.e., social—process goes on outside the home, and has to have its appropriate building. In these varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its true expression; the contact and interchange, the stimulus and relief, without which the human soul cannot live. ”

“ In a new home, house and barn and windmill square-cornered and prosaic, plumped down in a field with wheat coming up to the unporticoed door, a habitation unshadowed, unsheltered, unsoftened, she found a frank cleanness, as though the inhabitants looked squarely out at life, unafraid. ”

“ I was looking down upon the habitations of a million of human beings; upon the single spot whereon were crowded together more wealth, more splendour, more ingenuity, more worldly wisdom, and, alas! more worldly blindness, poverty, depravity, dishonesty, and wretchedness, than upon any other spot in the whole habitable earth. ”

“ The homes of the working people, just here, look as if intended to illustrate a revised edition of ‘the happy family.’ Human beings, both sexes, of several generations, judging from the very old looking women and the few old men, and the little babies we see, with horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and hens, all live under one outside upper roof, having perhaps the choice of apartments inside. The door-yards look neat, but without exception, every house has somewhere near the never-to-be-missed fertilizer pile, often higher than the house, and generally the bigger the house the bigger the pile. ”

“ I did like the look of that room.’ Very pregnant of influence are these introductions into a house scrupulously clean and tastily furnished—a house kept as the dwelling of every human being should be kept. Do we not know ourselves, if we go to visit a friend with a higher standard of art, morals, or culture, how subtle is the influence ”

“ I have built homes for more than five hundred families in fourteen years, and I have been getting daily more faith in human nature from my work among the poor tenants, though approaching that nature on a plane and under conditions that could scarcely promise better for disappointment. ”

“ The country is not a proper place to pursue such studies; but any man may chuse a healthy habitation in town, and live in a lightsome house, a high apartment, refreshed by a breeze in summer, and enlightened by the sun in winter. ”

“ The old familiar problems of our communal and social life—poverty, crime, and vice—assume new and strange forms under the conditions of modern urban existence. Inherited custom, tradition, all our ancient social and political heritages—human nature itself—have changed and are changing under the influence of the modern urban environment. ”

“ The very ideas of home and comfort which one might consider more fixed and permanent—more traditional—than most human notions, seem, with the increased complexity of modern life, especially on the lines of the present development of large cities, or commercial centres, liable to change. ”

“ So I will ask everyone here to think for a moment of their own homes, their own living-rooms, and especially of their parlours or drawing-rooms, which are by their nature intended to express not so much our domestic necessities as our domestic sense of the value of beauty, recreation, and rest. ”

“ In the first Ages of the World, before Men were united in Cities, and had learnt the studied Arts of Luxury, they lead in the Country plain harmless Lives; and Cottages, rather than Houses, might be said to be their Habitation. Those happy Times abounded with Leisure and Recreation: To feed the Flock, and cultivate the Land, was the only Employ of its peaceable Inhabitants ”

“ Have you ever realised what those acres and acres of crowded, heated, badly-built houses, over which you pass so quickly by train when you go in and out of London, mean? What kind of homes they make? What sort of human beings live and die there? Have you asked yourselves whether your [Pg 71] presence, your companionship, is needed there? Whether the little children want your teaching? Whether your gentleness, your refinement, your gaiety, your beauty, are wanted there? Neighbourhood! ”

“ The beginning of civilization was when the mother bid the rude men of the forest and hill to build the needed shelter in grove or cave to protect her and her helpless offspring. And from that simple shelter or thatched-roofed hut has sprung the vine-clad cottage, and the marble palace, and the family roof-tree of every house in every land. It was the mothers of men who filled up the broken ranks of war, and brought peace, and wove garments, and refined and civilized man and taught him the arts and commerce of civilized life. ”

“ These were all signs of habitation, yet no one moved about, no stir or bustle denoted that there were dwellers within. How different from the country life of our great houses in England, with trains of servants and equipages hurrying hither and thither—all the wealth and magnificence of the great capital transported to some far-off county, that ennui and fastidiousness, fatigue, and lassitude, should lose none of their habitual aids! Well, for my part, the life among green trees and flowers, where the thrush sings, and the bee goes humming by, can scarcely be too homely for my taste. ”

“ The structure and arrangements of a house adapted to the climate, soil, and wants of a family, including drainage, ventilation, warming, economy of labour; the management of a household in relation to individual wants and to society, including the subjects of food and waste, domestic service, petty trading, the care of the sick and prevention of disease, occupations and amusements—these and many other topics belong directly to the formation of a [Pg 246] noble Christian home. These are subjects that men and women have a direct personal interest in. ”

“ Can there exist a more delightful habitation for man, than a neat farm-house in the centre of a pleasing landscape? There avoiding disease and lassitude, useless expence, the waste of land in large and dismal parks, and above all, by preventing misery, and promoting happiness, we shall indeed have gained the prize of having united the agreeable with the useful. ”

“ Hence our household god, Comfort.
We are not satisfied merely with a home. It must be comfortable. The most wretched, indeed, are those who have no homes—the homeless! But not less wretched are those whose homes are without comfort—those of whom Charles Lamb once said, "The homes of the very poor are no homes." ”

“ The progress of domestic living has been in cleanliness, in ventilation, in health, in decorum, in countless means and arts of comfort, in the concentration of all the utilities of every clime in each house. ”

“ No habitation, therefore, in this country, should look old: it should give an impression of present prosperity, of swift motion and high energy of life; too rapid in its successive operation to attain greatness, or allow of decay, in its works. ”

“ The perfect house, as I conceive it, is to combine as many of the advantages of living out of doors as may be consistent with warmth and shelter, and one of these is the sympathy with green and growing things. ”

“ These habitations are, of course, held only by the poor and outcast, yet, in spite of circumstances, they live merrily from hand to mouth how they can, and by means, perhaps, not always of the most legitimate description. ”

“ The home has a story of its own, as has the family. In primitive days there was little necessity of a dwelling-place, except as a nest for young or a cache for provisions. A cave or a rough shelter of boughs was a makeshift for a home. ”

“ All I've ever done is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and look out at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard, and keep house and take care of you and the children. ”

“ Each presented circumstance of fertility or shelter, salubrity or beauty, may be named as what is wanting to a much greater number of the occupants of the world, than those to whom the "lines are fallen in such pleasant places." ”

“ Then will the disconsolate, forlorn, old world turn to Mother Nature to learn from her that the only Occupation that is of real and lasting worth is the one Occupation in which all of Mother Nature's children have fellowship—the Occupation of home building. ”

“ By-and-by we meet signs of inhabitants—a house or two; a few fields of mowing grass; the heaps of refuse at lead-mines, and our walk derives a pleasurable interest from the hourly change, the bleak, barren, and lonely, for the sheltered, the cultivated, and inhabited. ”

“ The house, with its exits and entrances, its properties of furniture and necessities, its dressing-tables, its warming-pans, and its tiny silver eye-bath still standing between the hair-brushes—the house demands its population. ”

“ All the inhabitants of these houses, no matter how large or fine they may be—and all our dwellings are spacious and magnificent—do whatever work may be necessary, and are ever ready to exert themselves in the interest both of themselves and of others. ”

“ This is in the habitation, or cottage, of the wise; and it is better to have an old-fashioned house, and have it well furnished, than a fine modern one, with sorry housekeeping. God blesses the endeavors of the wise and then their houses are replenished. ”

“ We have, for instance, yet to see that all our houses, however small, shall have a proper number of bedrooms, large, light, and airy—for we spend one-third of our lives in them. We have also to see that both beauty and fitness shall be properly considered in building a house. ”

“ They, and you, must have moral and mental food, baths, clothes and beds as well as physical ones—a home—not merely a house. We cannot give what we don’t have. To furnish these things to them we must first get them ourselves. ”

“ The dwellers within this city I am told seem not so much like members of one family, as parts of one healthy body, each performing its function and duty, the whole harmoniously blending in one form of symmetry and beauty ”

“ Society, or the shadow of it, is not to be dreamt of; and our residence, as far as I can learn, is to be a half-furnished house in the midst of rice-swamps, where our habitual company will be our slaves, and our occasional visitors an alligator or two from the Altamaha. ”

“ Those establishments were founded which have produced so marvellous a change in our household condition, surrounding all with so many comforts, and filling our dwellings with so vast a variety of the refinements and luxuries of life. ”

“ When the housing, for example, is of such a character as to make a healthy home life impossible, the boys and girls are driven to the streets, the men into saloons, and thus society is diseased at its source. ”

“ These general rules are intended only to emphasise the fact that in houses which are to become in the truest sense homes—that is, places of habitation which represent the inhabitants, directions or rules for beautiful colour and arrangement of interiors, must always follow the guiding incidents of class and locality. ”

“ Once more it must be stated that the true home, the legitimate and necessary home, the home in right proportion and development, is wholly good. It is at once the beautiful beginning, the constant help, and one legitimate end of a life's work. ”

“ Yes, everything that has life must have food of some kind. You remember I told you we had iron, lime, and other things to build the body-house, just as a man must have wood, brick, iron, and glass when he wishes to build. We have looked at the outside of the house we live in, and we have learned some things about its frame, its servants, the telephone system, and the master who lives inside. ”

“ I saw them construct dwelling-places for the use of their families, and exhibit attachment for localities, so much so that, from moment to moment, I saw a world fade away, and a new world arise in its place, like the changing of the scenes in a fairy-play. ”

“ Hence, it seems to me, the need which many of us feel, which most of us would feel, if secured of food and shelter, of spending a portion of their life of the spirit in places and climates beyond that River Oceanus which bounds the land of the living. ”

“ In so far as the inner life of a home may be influenced by environments is it possible and practical to plan for the strengthening of the home life of a community and no phase of life, in country or city, is too unimportant to engage notice. ”

“ Gains and Losses.—In the making of a modern home there have been both addition and subtraction. Life has gained immeasurably in comfort and convenience for the well-to-do, but the comfortless quarters of the poor drive the man to the saloon and the child to the streets. ”

“ When we build a house, it shall not be for its uses only. We shall have kitchens and drawing rooms and libraries and pictures and flowers, if possible. But the house, with all its comforts and luxuries, is mere framework, and our words and doings construct the true, the spiritual home. ”

“ The influence of dwelling-houses for good or for evil—their influence on the brain, the nerves, and, through these, on the heart and life—is one of those things that cannot be enough pondered by those who build houses to sell or rent. ”

“ The whole house is full of people, and every corner occupied. Where can I put you up? You are big and heavy enough to break the house down. I know these philosophers and theologians; when once one takes them in, they eat one out of house and home. ”