There can be no doubt that the difference between the mind of the lowest man and that of the highest animal is immense. An anthrop...omorphous ape, if he could take a dispassionate view of his own case, would admit that though he could form an artful plan to plunder a garden--though he could use stones for fighting or for breaking open nuts, yet that the thought of fashioning a stone into a tool was quite beyond his scope. Still less, as he would admit, could he follow out a train of metaphysical reasoning, or solve a mathematical problem, or reflect on God, or admire a grand natural scene. Some apes, however, would probably declare that they could and did admire the beauty of the coloured skin and fur of their partners in marriage. They would admit, that though they could make other apes understand by cries some of their perceptions and simpler wants, the notion of expressing definite ideas by definite sounds had never crossed their minds. They might insist that they were ready to aid their fellow-apes of the same troop in many ways, to risk their lives for them, and to take charge of their orphans; but they would be forced to acknowledge that disinterested love for all living creatures, the most noble attribute of man, was quite beyond their comprehension. Nevertheless, the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great object of Education should be commensurate with the object of life. It should be a moral one; to teach self-trust: to in...spire the youthful man with an interest in himself; with a curiosity touching his own nature; to acquaint him with the resources of his mind, and to teach him that there is all his strength, and to inflame him with a piety towards the Grand Mind in which he lives. Thus would education conspire with the Divine Providence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beside all the small reasons we assign, there is a great reason for the existence of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand ...and immovable, often unsuspected behind it in silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordaine...d, and societies modelled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great challenge which faces us is to assure that, in our society of big-ness, we do not strangle the voice of creativity, that... the rules of the game do not come to overshadow its purpose, that the grand orchestration of society leaves ample room for the man who marches to the music of another drummer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how y...ou build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The architect represents neither a Dionysian nor an Apollinian state: here it is the great act of will, the will that moves mounta...ins, the rapture of the great will which aspires to art. The mightiest men have always inspired architects; the architect has always been under the spell of power. In his buildings, pride, the victory over gravity, and the will to power strive to become visible; architecture is a species of the rhetoric of power in forms, now persuading, even flattering, now simply commanding. The highest feeling of power and sureness finds expression in that which possesses grand style.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I love Coleridge ... and I am very willing to allow that he has more imagination than Wordsworth, and more of the real poet. But a...fter all Coleridge is nothing more than an intellectual opium-eater--a man of many crude though lovely thoughts--of confused though brilliant imagination, liable to much error--error even of the heart, very sensual in many of his ideas of pleasure--indolent to a degree, and evidently and always thinking without discipline; letting the fine brains which God gave him work themselves irregularly and without end or object--and carry him whither they will. Wordsworth has a grand, consistent, perfectly disciplined, all grasping intellect--for which nothing is too small, nothing too great, arranging everything in due relations, divinely pure in its conventions of pleasure, majestic in the equanimity of its benevolence--intense as white fire with chastened feeling. Coleridge may be the greater poet, but surely it admits of no question which is the greater man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The family story tells, and it was told true, of my great-grandfather who begat eight... genius children and bought twelve almost new grand pianos. He left a considerable estate when he died.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »