... women of the North, I ask you to rise up with earnest, honest purpose, and go forward in the way of right, fearlessly, as inde...pendent human beings, responsible to God alone for the discharge of every duty, for the faithful use of every gift, the good Father has given you. Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world will say, whether you are in your place or out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, do your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We all ask ourselves the question why is it that some of us are killed while others remain. The only answer is our faith in the wi...sdom of a supreme being. If he has chosen us to live there must be a reason. I have tried to reckon out why. Perhaps he has saved us because we are needed as witnesses to remind each other, and our folks, and folks everywhere that war is too full of horrors for human beings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a man of sense happens to be in that disagreeable situation in which he is obliged to ask himself more than once, What shall ...I do? he will answer himself, Nothing. When his reason points out to him no good way, he will stop short, and wait for light. A little busy mind runs on at all events, must be doing; and, like a blind horse, fears no dangers, because he sees none. Il faut scavoir s'ennuïer.*LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What terrible questions we are learning to ask! The former men believed in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed... up, and all trace of them gone. We are coming on the secret of a magic which sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which they and their fathers held and were framed upon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I pray my companion, if he wishes for bread, to ask me for bread, and if he wishes for sassafras or arsenic, to ask me for them, a...nd not to hold out his plate, as if I knew already.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out,... And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn't love a wall, That wants it down.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »