In all times and in all places--in Constantinople, northwestern Zambia, Victorian England, Sparta, Arabia, . . . medieval France, ...Babylonia, . . . Carthage, Mahenjo-Daro, Patagonia, Kyushu, . . . Dresden--the time span between childhood and adulthood, however fleeting or prolonged, has been associated with the acquisition of virtue as it is differently defined in each society. A child may be good and morally obedient, but only in the process of arriving at womanhood or manhood does a human being become capable of virtue--that is, the qualities of mind and body that realize society's ideals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia... There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix At this hour reigning there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... continual hard labor deadens the energies of the soul, and benumbs the faculties of the mind; the ideas become confined, the m...ind barren, and, like the scorching sands of Arabia, produces nothing; or, like the uncultivated soil, brings forth thorns and thistles. Again, continual hard labor irritates our tempers and sours our dispositions; the whole system become worn out with toil and fatigue; nature herself becomes almost exhausted, and we care but little whether we live or die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This sand seemed to us the connecting link between land and water. It was a kind of water on which you could walk, and you could s...ee the ripple-marks on its surface, produced by the winds, precisely like those at the bottom of a brook or lake. We had read that Mussulmans are permitted by the Koran to perform their ablutions in sand when they cannot get water, a necessary indulgence in Arabia, and we now understand the propriety of this provision.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah, the pickerel of Walden! when I see them lying on the ice, or in the well which the fisherman cuts in the ice, making a little ...hole to admit the water, I am always surprised by their rare beauty, as if they were fabulous fishes, they are so foreign to the streets, even to the woods, foreign as Arabia to our Concord life. They possess a quite dazzling and transcendent beauty ... as if they were the pearls, the animalized nuclei or crystals of the Walden water. They, of course, are Walden all over and all through; are themselves small Waldens in the animal kingdom, Waldenses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we've told lies, you've told half-lies. And a man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth, but a man who tells half-lie...s has forgotten where he put it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »