The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest success ...is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world is young: the former great men call to us affectionately. We too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens and the e...arthly world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lord, with what care hast Thou begirt us round! Parents first season us; then schoolmasters... Deliver us to laws; they send us bound To rules of reason, holy messengers, Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin, Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, Bibles laid open, millions of surprises, Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness, The sound of glory ringing in our ears: Without, our shame; within, our consciences; Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears. Yet all these fences and their whole array One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When lions paint pictures men will not always be represented as conquerors. When women translate laws, constitutions, bibles and p...hilosophies, man will not always be the declared heard of the church, the state, and the home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every ho...use and every day we breathe in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reading which I love best is the scriptures of the several nations, though it happens that I am better acquainted with those o...f the Hindoos, the Chinese, and the Persians, than of the Hebrews, which I have come to last. Give me one of these bibles, and you have silenced me for a while. When I recover the use of my tongue, I am wont to worry my neighbors with the new sentences; but commonly they cannot see that there is any wit in them. Such has been my experience with the New Testament. I have not yet got to the crucifixion, I have read it over so many times. I should love dearly to read it aloud to my friends, some of whom are seriously inclined; it is so good, and I am sure that they have never heard it, it fits their case exactly, and we should enjoy it so much together,--but I instinctively despair of getting their ears. They soon show, by signs not to be mistaken, that it is inexpressibly wearisome to them. I do not mean to imply that I am any better than my neighbors; for, alas! I know that I am only as good, though I love better books than they.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can just remember an old brown-coated man who was the Walton of this stream, who had come over from Newcastle, England, with his... son,--the latter a stout and hearty man who had lifted an anchor in his day. A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat, hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method,--for youth and age then went a-fishing together,--full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A great proportion of architectural ornaments are literally hollow, and a September gale would strip them off, like borrowed plume...s, without injury to the substantials.... What if an equal ado were made about the ornaments of style in literature, and the architects of our bibles spent as much time about their cornices as the architects of our churches do? So are made the belles-lettres and the beaux-arts and their professors.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for the sacred Scriptures, or Bibles of mankind, who in this town can tell me even their titles? Most men do not know that any ...nation but the Hebrews have had a scripture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »