Too-broad questions, such as, "What's on your mind?" are apt to be answered "nothing" nearly one hundred percent of the time. Be c...areful of slipping into ""psycho-speak," however. Kids pick up instantly your attempt at being a pseudo-shrink. Most resent it and are apt to tune out anything that sounds like you're reading a script from the latest child-psychology text.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 »
How shall I behold the face Henceforth of God or Angel, earst with joy... And rapture so oft beheld? those heav'nly shapes Will dazle now this earthly, with thir blaze Insufferably bright. O might I here In solitude live savage, in some glade Obscur'd, where highest Woods impenetrable To Starr or Sun-light, spread thir umbrage broad, And brown as Eevening: Cover me ye Pines, Ye Cedars, with innumerable boughs Hide me, where I may never see them more. But let us now, as in bad plight, devise What best may for the present serve to hide The Parts of each from other, that seem most To Shame obnoxious, and unseemliest seen, Some Tree whose broad smooth Leaves together sowd, And girded on our loins, my cover round Those middle parts, that this new commer, Shame, There sit not, and reproach us as unclean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quidquid luce fuit tenebris agit: but also the other way around. What we experience in dreams, so long as we experience it frequen...tly, is in the end just as much a part of the total economy of our soul as anything we "really" experience: because of it we are richer or poorer, are sensitive to one need more or less, and are eventually guided a little by our dream-habits in broad daylight and even in the most cheerful moments occupying our waking spirit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake;... Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, Choose thou, before that spirit die, A piercing pain, a killing sin, And to my dead heart run them in!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is best to lay our plans widely in youth, for then land is cheap, and it is but too easy to contract our views afterward. Youth...s so laid out, with broad avenues and parks, that they may make handsome and liberal old men! Show me a youth whose mind is like some Washington city of magnificent distances, prepared for the most remotely successful and glorious life after all, when those spaces shall be built over and the idea of the founder be realized. I trust that every New England boy will begin by laying out a Keene Street through his head, eight rods wide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the light...,--to see its perfect success; but most are content to behold it in the shape of many broad boards brought to market, and deem that its true success! But the pine is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so broad and truly liberal that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom... you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock,--that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky, when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing could be more beautiful than our passage down the Hudson [River].... The change, the contrast, the ceaseless variety of be...auty, as you skim from side to side, the liquid smoothness of the broad mirror which reflects the scene, and most of all, the clear bright air through which you look at it; all this can only be seen and believed by crossing the Atlantic.... The magnificent boldness of the Jersey shore on the one side, and the luxurious softness of the shady lawns on the other, with the vast silvery stream that flows between them, altogether form a picture which may well excuse a traveller for saying, once and again, that the Hudson river can be surpassed in beauty by none on the outside of Paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account... of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Suffragists, hear this last call to a suffrage convention! The officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association hereby call their State auxiliaries, through their elected delegates, to meet in annual convention at Chicago, Congress Hotel, February 12th to 18th, inclusive. In other days our members and friends have been summoned to annual conventions to disseminate the propaganda for their common cause, to cheer and encourage each other, to strengthen their organized influence, to counsel as to ways and means of insuring further progress. At this time they are called to rejoice that the struggle is over, the aim achieved and the women of the nation about to enter into the enjoyment of their hard-earned political liberty. Of all the conventions held within the past fifty-one years, this will prove the most momentous. Few people live to see the actual and final realization of hopes to which they have devoted their lives. That privilege is ours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »