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 »
Your Englishman, confronted by something abnormal will always pretend that it isn't there. If he can't pretend that, he will look ...through the object, or round it, or above it or below it, or in any direction except into it. If, however, you force him to look into it, he will at once pretend that he sees the object not for what it is but for something that he would like it to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetti...ng and accursed principle of action--that the end will sanction any means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thin...g is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first--and all this for trifles that no man really needs!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear, for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than legs, nor no more shoes than f...eet--nay, sometime more feet than shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the overleather.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant? We should live in all the ages of... the world in an hour; ay, in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!--I know of no reading of another's experience so startling and informing as this would be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,... You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,) You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched,... Through thee the rose is red, All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, And is the mill-round of our fate A sun-path in thy worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees... Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »