# Hawaii is a special place. It is truly multicultural… more nearly a nation than any other state… We may be a small state geographically, but we are a giant in terms of human relations, human understanding, and the achievement of human dignity. … We should start with the core idea of Hawaii as a “melting pot,” where each of us retains our own identity but comes together with others for our mutual cultural enrichment. – George R Ariyoshi
# There is another quality to Hawaii that cannot be measured in mountaing heights or the sunny allure of beaches fringed by palm trees. There are other places in other oceans – even in this same ocean – with sunny weather and white sand beaches, places where mountains rise even higher, the land is greater in size and diversity and the history more dramatic. But nowhere else is there a place so small as Hawaii with such a world of differences among its people and their cultures blending so naturally with an exotic environment. The life of Hawaii, as it is lived today and as it was lived hundreds of years before, is as important to any meaningful understanding of these islands as the beauty of the land itself. – Tom and Karen Horton
# ‘Aloha’ was a recognition of life in another. If there was life there was mana, goodness and wisdom, and if there was goodness and wisdom there was a god-quality. One had to recognize the ‘god of life’ in another before saying ‘Aloha,’ but this was easy. Life was everywhere … Aloha had its own mana. It never left the giver but flowed freely and continuously between giver and receiver. ‘Aloha’ could not be thoughtlessly or indiscriminately spoken, for it carried its own power. No Hawaiian could greet another with ‘Aloha’ unless he felt it in his own heart. If he felt anger or hate in his heart he had to cleanse himself before he said ‘Aloha’. – Queen Lili’uokalani
# Hawaii is a Paradise – and I can never cease proclaiming it; but I must append one word of qualification: Hawaii is a Paradise for the well-to-do. – Jack London
# In what other land save this one is the commonest form of greeting not “Good day,” nor “How d’ye do”, but “Love”? That greeting is ‘Aloha’: love, I love you, my love to you… It is a positive affirmation of the warmth of one’s own heart-giving. – Jack London
# It was an ancient rule of Hawaiians that “no one should hurt another bodily, or through theft of goods, or through injury to feelings.” These were the only sins. – Max Freedom Long
# Though the air is so soft and the sky so blue, you have, I know not why, a feeling of something hotly passionate that beats like a throbbing pulse through the crowd. Though the native policeman … gives the scene an air of respectability, you cannot but feel that it is a respectability only of the surface: a little below there is a darkness and mystery. W. Somerset Maugham on Hawaii
# Hawai’i has an incredible, fascinating past … No place on earth has anything like the true stories that make up Hawai’i history. … The sun, sand, and surf may be the reasons so many people come to the Islands, but the culture and heritage are the reasons so many people stay. I, for one, could never get enough Hawai’i history. – Brian Nichol
# It seems that everybody goes to Hawaii, and no matter what their tastes, they love it. … Now that we’ve been there, we’ve become just like everyone else–we loved it. – Geoff and Lauren Slater
# Oh, how my spirit languishes
to step ashore in the Sanguishes… – Robert Louis Stevenson
# If anyone desire such old-fashioned things as lovely scenery, quiet, pure air, clear sea water, good food, and heavenly sunsets hung out before his eyes over the Pacific and the distant hills of Waianae, I recommend him cordially to the “Sans Souci.” – Robert Louis Stevenson (inscription in the hotel register)
# I have just been a week away alone on the lee coast of Hawaii … a lovely week among God’s best – at least God’s sweetest – works, Polynesians. It has bettered me greatly. If I could only stay there the time that remains, I could get my work done and be happy… – Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter from Honolulu on May 10, 1889
# The thought that haunts the stranger in Hawaii is that of Italy. … Countenances of the same eloquent harshness, manners of the same vivacious cordiality, are to be found in Hawaii and among Italian fisherfolk. I know no race that carries years more handsomely, whose people, in the middle way of life, retain more charm. I recall faces, both of men and women, with a certain leonine stamp, trusty, sagacious, brave, beautiful in plainness; faces that take the heart captive. – Robert Louis Stevenson
# The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean. – Mark Twain’s characterizxation of the future Aloha State
# That peaceful land, that beautiful land, that far-off home of solitude and soft idleness, and repose, and reams, where life is one long slumberous Sabbath, the climate one long summer day, and the good that die experience no change, for they but fall asleep in one heaven and wake up in another. – Mark Twain on Hawaii
# What I have always longed for was the privilege of living forever away up on one of those mountains in the Sandwich Islands overlooking the sea…. no alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides, other things change, but it remains the same… – Mark Twain on Hawaii