Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of ...life, on their faith in the Invisible--nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where by beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas--where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You'll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you've got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder... a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ghost of the heart of manred Cain And the more murderous brain... Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death Of his mother Earth, and tore Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps I most fully realized that this was primeval, untamed, and forever untamable, Nature.... It is difficult to conceive of a ...region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast and drear and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden, but the unhandseled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth, as it was made forever and ever,--to be the dwelling of man, we say,--so Nature made it, and man may use it if he can. Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific,--not his Mother Earth that we have heard of, not for him to tread on, or be buried in,--no, it were being too familiar even to let his bones lie there,--the home this, of Necessity and Fate. There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,--to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Morality and its victim, the mother--what a terrible picture! Is there indeed anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glor...ified sacred function of motherhood?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law? The law is stationary. The law is fixed. ...The law is a chariot wheel which binds us all regardless of conditions or place or time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the indefinite, uncertain mind of the American radical the most contradictory ideas and methods are possible. The result is a s...ad chaos in the radical movement, a sort of intellectual hash, which has neither taste nor character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since every effort in our educational life seems to be directed toward making of the child a being foreign to itself, it must of n...ecessity produce individuals foreign to one another, and in everlasting antagonism with each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »