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 »
Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It mi...ght even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O birds, your perfect virtues bring, Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight,... Your manners for your heart's delight, Nestle in hedge, or barn, or roof, Here weave your chamber weather-proof, Forgive our harms, and condescend To man, as to a lubber friend, And, generous, teach his awkward race Courage, and probity, and grace!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nobody is so heartily despised as a pusillanimous, lazy, good-for-nothing, land-lubber; a sailor has no bowels of compassion for h...im.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tells how the drudging goblin sweat, To earn his cream-bowl duly set,... When in one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn That ten day-laborers could not end: Then lies him down the lubber fend, And stretched out all the chimney's length, Basks at the fire his hairy strength; And crop-full out of doors he flings, Ere the first cock his matin rings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Up through the lubber crust of Wales I rocketed to astonish... The flashing needle rock of squatters, The criers of Shabby and Shorten, The famous stitch droppers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop awa...y from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have no thoughts of our own: they are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly cred...itable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome, for all I care.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »