The blacksmith dropped his hammer, the carpenter his plane, the mason his trowel, the farmer his sickle, the baker his loaf, and t...he tapster his bottle. All were off for the mines, some on horses, some on carts, and some on crutches, and one went in a litter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet will prevail to be popular in spite of his faults, and in spite of his beauties too. He will hit the nail on the head, an...d we shall not know the shape of his hammer. He makes us free of his hearth and heart, which is greater than to offer one the freedom of a city.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.... She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sis'e-ra, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What the hammer?What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?... What the anvil?What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument y...ou write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law a...nd respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent....
All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs. The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is not precious, a thing to be cherished. The soul and the mind are the instruments God gives us for our use and half of us d...on't begin to use them. We put Life and Health on two little pedestals and spend most of our time performing acts of devotion before them. Instead of using them as a carpenter his tools, as a helmsman the rudder, to hammer or steer our way to victory, we turn ourselves into Vestal Virgins with nothing on the face of the earth to do but to feed the feeble flames of our comfort. Life is no craven thing, lurking coward-like in a corner. It is big, broad, splendid in opportunity. It is to be used, not cherished. It is to be spent, not saved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »