All mothers need instruction, nurturing, and an understanding mentor after the birth of a baby, but in this age of fast foods, fas...t tracks, and fast lanes, it doesn't always happen. While we live in a society that provides recognition for just about every life event--from baptisms to bar mitzvahs, from wedding vows to funeral rites--the entry into parenting seems to be a solo flight, with nothing and no one to mark formally the new mom's entry into motherhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character ...which draws them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is not any present moment that is unconnected with some future one. The life of every man is a continued chain of incidents,... each link of which hangs upon the former. The transition from cause to effect, from event to event, is often carried on by secret steps, which our foresight cannot divine, and our sagacity is unable to trace. Evil may at some future period bring forth good; and good may bring forth evil, both equally unexpected.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is known that Whistler when asked how long it took him to paint one of his "nocturnes" answered: "All of my life." With the sam...e rigor he could have said that all of the centuries that preceded the moment when he painted were necessary. From that correct application of the law of causality it follows that the slightest event presupposes the inconceivable universe and, conversely, that the universe needs even the slightest of events.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences. What happened in the past is lived again in memory. ...About what goes on today hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an experience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely hard, a thing into which one bumps; but it is a monument of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns from his casual wanderings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an eve...nt happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Election day!... Spiegel Grove, my home, never looked so beautiful before.... I prefer success. But I anticipate defeat with very ...great equanimity. If victorious, I am likely to be pushed for the Republican nomination for President. This would make my life a disturbed and troubled one until the nomination, six or eight months hence. If nominated the stir would last until a year hence. Defeat in the next Presidential election is almost a certainty. In any event, defeat now returns me to the quiet life I sought in coming here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All the philosophy, therefore, in the world, and all the religion, which is nothing but a species of philosophy, will never be abl...e to carry us beyond the usual course of experience, or give us measures of conduct and behaviour different from those which are furnished by reflections on common life. No new fact can ever be inferred from the religious hypothesis; no event foreseen or foretold; no reward or punishment expected or dreaded, beyond what is already known by practice and observation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All great things bring about their own destruction through an act of self-overcoming: thus the law of life will have it, the law o...f the necessity of "self-overcoming" in the nature of life--the lawgiver himself eventually receives the call: "patere legem, quam ipse tulisti." In this way Christianity as a dogma was destroyed by its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must now perish, too: we stand on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question "what is the meaning of all will to truth?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »