These New England quotes will inspire you. New England is a region comprising six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging New England quotes, New England sayings, and New England proverbs.
Best New England Quotes
- “No people require maxims so much as the American. The reason is obvious: the country is so vast, the people always going somewhere, from Oregon apple valley to boreal New England, that we do not know whether to be temperate orchards or sterile climate.” ~ Edward Dahlberg
- “The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America’s future.” ~ Helen Keller
- “This fair homestead has fallen to us, and how little have we done to improve it, how little have we cleared and hedged and ditched! We are too inclined to go hence to a “better land,” without lifting a finger, as our farmers are moving to the Ohio soil; but would it not be more heroic and faithful to till and redeem this New England soil of the world?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
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“I’ve found places that are just as beautiful as New England, but this is my home.” ~ Jan Brett
- “Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather… In the spring I have counted one hundred and twenty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.” ~ Mark Twain , New England quotes weather
- “Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,–a creed ample enough for this life and the next.” ~ James Russell Lowell
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“Growing up in New England, being schooled and classically trained, it needed to shake, it needed to evolve.” ~ Emeril Lagasse
- “Continuity is one of the things I like about New England.” ~ Tracy Kidder
- “New England has a strong tradition of localism. What is ordinarily called election day in most of the United States is called town meeting day in Vermont.” ~ Murray Bookchin
- “As for what you’re calling hard luck – well, we made New England out of it. That and codfish.” ~ Stephen Vincent Benet
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“The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them.” ~ H. P. Lovecraft
- “The people who came to New England, came for freedom of religion. The problem is, freedom of religion to them meant freedom for only their religion” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “New England clam chowder, made as it should be, is a dish to preach about, to chant praises and sing hymns and burn incense before. […] It is as American as the Stars and Stripes, as patriotic as the national Anthem. It is Yankee Doodle in a kettle.” ~ Joseph C. Lincoln
- “I moved to New England partly because it has a real literary past. The ghosts of Hawthorne and Melville still sit on those green hills. The worship of Mammon is also somewhat lessened there by the spirit of irony. I don’t get hay fever in New England either.” ~ John Updike
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“The most serious charge which can be brought against New England is not Puritanism but February.” ~ Joseph Wood Krutch
- “The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.” ~ John Updike
- “For anyone who lives in the oak-and-maple area of New England, there is a perennial temptation to plunge into a purple sea of adjectives about October.” ~ Hal Borland
- “People in New England think that the Red Sox won that series, three games to four.” ~ Carlton Fisk
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“If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.” ~ Mark Twain
- “New England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . . It is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.” ~ Bernard DeVoto
- “Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.” ~ Bill Bryson
- “June in New England is like a lover’s dream made tangible.” ~ Gladys Taber
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“One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.” ~ Mark Twain
- “When eras die, their legacies Are left to strange police. Professors in New England guard The glory that was Greece.” ~ Clarence Day
- “I think we have to find somebody out there to beat New England besides us, and I think that would help. Anybody out there that wants to sign up for it? Are you good enough as a team to beat the New England Patriots? Forget about us, are you good enough to go out and beat the New England Patriots? I’m challenging the league.” ~ Rex Ryan
- “Playing in New England and the Boston area, the fans are so passionate about their sports if you don’t play well, they’ll let you know so I know it’s not something that they take lightly.” ~ Drew Bledsoe
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“What great interval is there between him who is caught in Africa and made a plantation slave of in the South, and him who is caught in New England and made a Unitarian minister of?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “There is the view I call penal non-substitution, or the penal example view. (It is also called the Governmental View in textbooks of theology.) This is often associated with Arminian theology stemming from the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius. However, the view was taken up by [Jonathan] Edwards’s disciples in New England, who developed a Calvinistic strand of the doctrine.” ~ Oliver D. Crisp
- “A great number of soundings, mainly along the continental slope of the New England States were also taken by the vessels of the United States Fish Commission. Important soundings were made by the United States Fish Commission steamer ALBATROSS in the Caribbean, during the winter of 1883-1884.” ~ Alexander Agassiz
- “For Cider House Rules, I was doing a New England accent.” ~ Michael Caine
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“New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the “New England idea”-could no longer serve.” ~ Alfred Kazin
- “When we went into the New England states, people were talking about the new sound of Flatt & Scruggs, but we had been doing that sound for 20 years.” ~ Lester Flatt
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“I don’t cheer for anyone because my job is obviously more important, but the reason why I got into sports is because of my father. He’s a giant sports fan and we are from New England, so he cheered for the Celtics and the Red Sox.” ~ Erin Andrews
- “Buckminster Fuller was down in Pennsylvania, then he’d come up and go to his island in Maine. He wanted to remain a New Englander. He taught from ’48 to ’49 and ’50 at Black Mountain College. That’s where he met Kenneth Snelson. Fuller kind of stayed a Yankee right in the New England area. So it was pretty easy to get him to come on over, and we would have lectures at the Harvard Science Center.” ~ Paul Laffoley
- “My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I’m a Virginian Ballard.” ~ Robert Ballard
- “My shape reminds me a lot of my grandmother, whom I was really close to. She died when I was 13, and we have a really similar body type, the squat New England woman who can roll out dough and bring in your lawnmower. That’s kind of the vibe of my body, and I’m into it.” ~ Lena Dunham
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“Growing up in Boston, I was always Matt, Son of Former New England Patriot Don. And then when my brother Tim was a senior in high school, I became Matt, Brother of Tim.” ~ Matt Hasselbeck
- “[If] we can celebrate that in a way that celebrates our love for New England as well as our love for the Italian culture as well as the American culture, then we’ve done something that’s really good and supporting these fishermen who are doing the right thing in sustainability . . . paying attention to make sure we don’t overfish our world.” ~ Mario Batali
- “I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell” ~ Lewis Thomas
- “You can see the goldenrod, that most tenacious and pernicious and beauteous of all New England flora, bowing away from the wind like a great and silent congregation.” ~ Stephen King
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“Sign at a New England church: Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?” ~ Dave Barry
- “In New England, they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
- “The New England conscience doesn’t keep you from doing what you shouldn’t – it just keeps you from enjoying it.” ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer
- “I grew up in New England. I think I was brought up with the Puritan ethic: that if you worked really hard in life, then good would come to you. The harder you work, the luckier you get. I’ve come to believe that it’s the smarter you work, the better.” ~ Ken Blanchard
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“My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.” ~ John Knowles
- “If any pale student, glued to his desk, here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruits is that pallid and emasculate scholarship of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the oar.” ~ Francis Parkman
- “We heard the army before we saw it. The noise was like a cannon barrage combined with a football stadium crowd- like every Patriots fan in New England was charging us with bazookas.” ~ Rick Riordan
- “When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.” ~ Alice Hoffman
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“I’m confident in my ability to maintain a career. I don’t know if it will be doing either independent films or plays in New England.” ~ Randy Harrison
- “The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me. … The pageantry of the Roman Church that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me, churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at all.” ~ Mary Catherwood
- “In New York and New England the sap starts up in the sugar maple the very day the bluebird arrives, and sugar-making begins forthwith. The bird is generally a mere disembodied voice; a rumor in the air for two or three days before it takes visible shape before you.” ~ John Burroughs
- “The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, which looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch.” ~ Anthony Burgess
- “New England has two factors to get them ready to play. They’ve consistently been, if not the best, the second best team all year and they’re playing confidently. And a lot of those guys were on field when they lost to LA. They’ll take motivation in that.” ~ Landon Donovan
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“From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World’s Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk.” ~ John Greenleaf Whittier
- “Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana, they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the non-slaveholding States. Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits. Whatever then their cause may be, it is common to the whole country.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
- “Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “I was never accepted into certain parts of New England society because my grandfather was an Irish barkeep.” ~ John F. Kennedy
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“I am in Boston right now, in fact, to do work at the New England Historical Genealogical Library, where I’m trying to finish up tracing my lineage back to the seventeenth century.” ~ Rick Moody
- “In Canada, an ordinary New England house would be mistaken for the château, and while every village here contains at least several gentlemen or “squires,” there is but one to a seigniory.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.” ~ Thomas B. Macaulay
- “In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of one of the New England states, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled “Harley College.” ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “The female population exceeds the male, you know, especially in New England, which accounts for the high state of culture we are in, perhaps.” ~ Louisa May Alcott
