Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me ...that you may be justified?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So-called "austerity," the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path.... "Pull in your belt" is a slogan closely related to "gird up your loins," or the guns-butter metaphor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the... Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humility; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountain-head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We hear much of chivalry of men towards women; but ... it vanishes like dew before the summer sun when one of us comes into compet...ition with the manly sex. Let a woman sit, weep, wring her hands, and exult in her own helplessness, and the modern knight buckles on his imaginary breastplate and draws his sword in her behalf; but when the woman girds up her loins for the battle of life, ready to fight like a lioness, if need be, to put food in the mouths of her children, let her select for her field the living-room or the cooking range.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's the use of worrying? It never was worth while,... So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, And smile, smile, smile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you are ambitious of climbing up to the difficult, and in a manner inaccessible, summit of the Temple of Fame, your surest way ...is to leave on one hand the narrow path of Poetry, and follow the narrower track of Knight-Errantry, which in a trice may raise you to an imperial throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »