As in digging for precious metals in the mines, much earthy rubbish has first to be troublesomely handled and thrown out; so, in d...igging in one's soul for the fine gold of genius, much dullness and common-place is first brought to light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.... He must not be afraid to return again and... again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand--like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery--in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The humblest observer who goes to the mines sees and says that gold-digging is of the character of a lottery; the gold thus obtain...ed is not the same thing with the wages of honest toil. But, practically, he forgets what he has seen, for he has seen only the fact, not the principle, and goes into trade there, that is, buys a ticket in what commonly proves another lottery, where the fact is not so obvious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these ...are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine... than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds. I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some people are like ants. Give them a warm day and a piece of ground and they start digging. There the similarity ends. Ants keep... on digging. Most people don't. They establish contact with the soil, absorb so much vernal vigor that they can't stay in one place, and desert the fork or spade to see how the rhubarb is coming and whether the asparagus is yet in sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that ...valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don't want to die!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of t...he pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know, many people believe that we archaeologists are just a collection of old fogies digging around in the ruins after old dri...ed up skulls and bones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »