She [Evelina] is a little angel!... Her face and person answer my most refined ideas of complete beauty.... She has the same gentl...eness in her manners, the same natural graces in her motions, that I formerly so much admired in her mother. Her character seems truly ingenuous and simple; and at the same time that nature has blessed her with an excellent understanding and great quickness of parts, she has a certain air of inexperience and innocency that is extremely interesting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without our being especially conscious of the transition, the word "parent" has gradually come to be used as much as a verb as a n...oun. Whereas we formerly thought mainly about "being a parent," we now find ourselves talking about learning how "to parent." . . . It suggests that we may now be concentrating on action rather than status, on what we do rather than what or who we are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly.... News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am grown old, and have possibly lost a great deal of that fire, which formerly made me love fire in others at any rate, and howe...ver attended with smoke: but now I must have all sense, and cannot, for the sake of five righteous lines, forgive a thousand absurd ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fox, he felt, had never seen his past disposed of like a fall of water. He had never measured off his day in moments: another-...-another--another. But now, thrown down so deeply in himself, into the darkness of the well, surprised by pain and hunger, might he not revert to an earlier condition, regain capacities which formerly were useless to him, pass from animal to Henry, become human in his prison, X his days, count, wait, listen for another--another--another--another?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Formerly they had a heaven adorned with a vast wealth of thoughts and imagery. The meaning of all that is, hung on the thread of l...ight by which it was linked to that heaven. Instead of dwelling in this world's presence, men looked beyond it, following this thread to an other-worldly presence, so to speak. The eye of the Spirit had to be forcibly turned and held fast to the things of this world; and it has taken a long time before the lucidity which only heavenly things used to have could penetrate the dullness and confusion in which the sense of worldly things was enveloped, and so make attention to the here and now as such, attention to what has been called 'experience', an interesting and valid enterprise. Now we seem to need just the opposite; sense is so fast rooted in earthly things that it requires just as much force to raise it. The Spirit shows itself as so impoverished that, like a wanderer in the desert craving for a mere mouthful of water, it seems to crave for its refreshment only the bare feeling of the divine in general. By the little which now satisfies Spirit, we can measure the extent of its loss.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For of those [cities] that were great in earlier times, most of them have now become small, while those which were great in my tim...e were small formerly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thanks to recent trends in the theory of knowledge, history is now better aware of its own worth and unassailability than it forme...rly was. It is precisely in its inexact character, in the fact that it can never be normative and does not have to be, that its security lies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Cities are expanding at an alarming rate. Inter-tidal zones are being polluted as mangroves gives way to marina. Over-consumption ...is leading to soil erosion and desertification, which in turn cause famine and exert pressure on formerly fertile areas. We are pulling out the plugs of the system that keeps us alive. Every indicator is showing red: species diversity, water quality, weather patterns, the number of refugees.... We are unravelling nature like an old jumper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »