I, who have preached and pamphleteered like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my methods are of no use, and would be no use ...if I were Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Morris all rolled into one, with Euripides, More, Montaigne, Molière, Baumarchais, Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Jesus, and the prophets all thrown in (as indeed in some sort I am, standing as I do on all their shoulders). The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most foreign and picturesque structures on the Cape, to an inlander, not excepting the salt-works, are the windmills,--gray- l...ooking, octagonal towers, with long timbers slanting to the ground in the rear, and there resting on a cart-wheel, by which their fans are turned round to face the wind.... They looked loose and slightly locomotive, like huge wounded birds, trailing a wing or a leg, and reminded one of pictures of the Netherlands. Being on elevated ground, and high in themselves, they serve as landmarks,--for there are no tall trees, or other objects commonly, which can be seen at a distance in the horizon; though the outline of the land itself is so firm and distinct, that an insignificant cone, or even a precipice of sand, is visible at a great distance from over the sea. Sailors making the land commonly steer either by the windmills, or the meeting-houses. In the country, we are obliged to steer by the meeting-houses alone. Yet the meeting-house is a kind of windmill, which runs one day in seven, turned either by the winds of doctrine or public opinion, or more rarely by the winds of Heaven, where another sort of grist is ground, of which, if it be not all bran or musty, if it be not plaster, we trust to make the bread of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think that our villages will bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with nature. I have no great respect for the write...r's taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages, embellished, perchance, with a "fulling-mill," "a handsome academy," or a meeting-house, and "a number of shops for the different mechanic arts"; where the green and white houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front on a street of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most like a desert or a long stable-yard. Such spots can be beautiful only to the weary traveler, or the returning native,--or, perchance, the repentant misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has just come out of the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road, through a succession of straggling homesteads where he cannot tell which is the almshouse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would... it not tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect, you whose garments are hot whe...n the earth is still because of the south wind? Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambus...hed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed. It was hounds on the trail of a man running through slimy swamps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause--I wish I could name every one--but with such women consecrating... their lives, failure is impossible!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »