As a philanthropist in general, and a friend to the Polynesians in particular, I hope that these Edens of the South Seas, blessed ...with fertile soils and peopled with happy natives, many being yet uncontaminated by the contact of civilization, will long remain unspoiled in their simplicity, beauty, and purity. And as for annexation, I beg to offer up an earnest prayer--and I entreat all present and all Christians to join me in it--that the banns of that union should be forbidden until we have found for ourselves a civilization morally, mentally, and physically higher than one which has culminated in almshouses, prisons, and hospitals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and howe...ver attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity ...to figurative art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It must not be thought that the cowardly feeling of caution and uneasy self-preservation is innate in the English character. It is... the consequence of a corpulence derived from wealth and of the training of all thoughts and passions for acquisitiveness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressi...vely diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although Samuel had a depraved imagination--perhaps even because of this--love, for him, was less a matter of the senses than of t...he intellect. It was, above all, admiration and appetite for beauty; he considered reproduction a flaw of love, and pregnancy a form of insanity. He wrote on one occasion: "Angels are hermaphrodite and sterile."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is cotter-pinned, it is bedded true. Everything its parts can do... Has been thought out and accounted for. Your least touch sets it going round, And when top stop it rests with you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematic...s of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shams, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know not how, But I do find it cowardly and vile,... For fear of what might fall, so to prevent The time of life--arming myself with patience To stay the providence of some high powers That govern us below.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reasons you allege do more conduce To the hot passion of distempered blood... Than to make up a free determination 'Twixt right and wrong; for pleasure and revenge Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice Of any true decision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »