Seen with the terrestially sullied eye, we are in the situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel,... and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the light At the end of the tunnel as it might be seen... By him looking out somberly at the shower, The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from, Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete You can't have.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English public are not yet ripe to comprehend the essential difference between the reason and the understanding,--between a pr...inciple and a maxim--an eternal truth and a mere conclusion from a generalization of a great number of facts.... Suppose Adam watching the sun sinking under the horizon for the first time; he is seized with gloom and terror, relieved with scarce a ray of hope of ever seeing the glorious light again. The next evening when it declines, his hopes are stronger but mixed with fear, and even at the end of 1000 years, all that a man can feel, is hope and an expectation so strong as to preclude anxiety. Compare this in its highest degree with the assurance which you have that the two sides of any triangle are greater than the third. This demonstrated of one triangle is seen to be eternally true of all imaginable triangles. This is the truth perceived at once by the reason, wholly independently of experience. It is and must ever be so, multiply and vary the shapes and sizes of triangles as you may.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I would call the attention of the reader to the difference between "reason" and "reasoning." Reason is a light, reasoning a proces...s. Reason is a faculty, reasoning an exercise of that faculty. Reasoning proceeds from one truth to another by means of argumentation. This generally involves the whole mind in labor and complexity. But reason does not exist merely in order to engage in reasoning. The process is a means to an end. The true fulfillment of reason as a faculty is found when it can embrace the truth simply and without labor in the light of single intuition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and... Clare goes back to her grave)Mbut the hero remains, for try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we are both someone whom neither of us knows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Getting up some time after midnight to collect the scattered brands together, while my companions were sound asleep, I observed, p...artly in the fire, which had ceased to blaze, a perfectly regular elliptical ring of light, about five inches in its shortest diameter, six or seven in its longer, and from one eighth to one quarter of an inch wide. It was fully as bright as the fire, but not reddish or scarlet, like a coal, but a white and slumbering light, like the glow-worm's. I could tell it from the fire only by its whiteness. I saw at once that it must be phosphorescent wood, which I had so often heard of, but never chanced to see. Putting my finger on it, with a little hesitation, I found that it was a piece of dead moose-wood (Acer striatum).... Using my knife, I discovered that the light proceeded from that portion of the sap-wood immediately under the bark, and thus presented a regular ring at the end, which, indeed, appeared raised above the level of the wood, and when I pared off the bark and cut into the sap, it was all aglow along the log.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Good-by, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise--but his creator strolls aw...ay. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End: the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow's morning haze--nor does this terminate the phrase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;... Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam, And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies, The atlas-eater with a jaw for news, Bit out the mandrake with to-morrow's scream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »