Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the termini which bound the common silence on every side. The parti...es are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on these walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of genius in an essentially common person is detestable.... It spoils the grand neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass spoil a draught of fair water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The work of the world is common as mud. Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.... But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. ... The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate read...er. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water..., made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One thing is plain for all men of common sense and common conscience, that here, here in America, is the home of man. After all th...e deductions which are to be made of for our pitiful politics, which stake every gravest national question on the silly die, whether James or whether Jonathan shall sit in the chair and hold the purse; after all the deduction is made for our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers opportunity to the human mind not known in any other region.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the rusty Pump pumps over your sweating face the clear... Water, cold, so cold! you cup your hands And gulp from them the dailiness of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »