Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, "I ha...ve no pleasure in them"; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; in the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
. . . Look! this flesh how it crumbles to dust and is blown! These bones, how they grind in the granite of frost and are noth...ing! This skull, how it yawns for a flicker of time in the darkness, Yet laughs not and sees not!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as every conviction begins as a whim so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great lead...er who is just entering the room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I review novels to make money, because it is easier for a sluggard to write an article a fortnight than a book a year, because the... writer is soothed by the opiate of action, the crank by posing as a good journalist, and having an airhole. I dislike it. I do it and I am always resolving to give it up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists..., has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By Jesus's time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmer...s, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: "It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns", this is taken to mean: "It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It's round, juicy an' sweet when dey gits it. But de squeeze... an' grind, squeeze an' grind an' wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat's in 'em out. When dey's satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats dem jes lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws 'em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin' while dey is at it, an hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin' after huh tell she's empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein' a cane-chew an' in de way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »