The world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the chara...cter of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author's control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven's Symphonies, with Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations--with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them because you say, "These things were not made, they were seen."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to... see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love. My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,... Are gone from the house. My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite And night is night.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our age is very cheap and intelligible. Unroof any house, and you shall find it. The well-being consists in having a sufficiency o...f coffee and toast, with a daily newspaper; a well glazed parlor, with marbles, mirrors and centre-table; and the excitement of a few parties and a few rides in a year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, during his daily walk, he met any children flying kites, playing marbles, or whirling peg tops, he would buy the toys from the...m and exhort them not to gamble or indulge in vain sport.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Geoff Carter: Got a match? Bonnie Lee: Say, don't you ever have any?... Geoff: No, don't believe in laying in a supply of anything. Bonnie: Matches, marbles, money, women. Geoff: That's right. Bonnie: No looking ahead, no tomorrows, just today. Geoff: That's right.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A Judge may be a farmer; but he is not to geld his own pigs. A Judge may play a little at cards for his own amusement; but he is n...ot to play at marbles, or chuck farthing in the Piazza.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good. They are the works of vision...aries and dreamers, but they are realizations of soul, the representations of the ideal. They are grand, beautiful, and true, and they speak with a voice that echoes through the ages. Governments have changed; empires have fallen; nations have passed away; but these mute marbles remain--the oracles of time, the perfection of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal t...int, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »