I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know t...heir sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have observed, that a Reader seldom peruses a Book with Pleasure, 'till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair M...an, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For man is but the servant and interpreter of nature: what he does and what he knows is only what he has observed of nature's orde...r in fact or in thought; beyond this he knows nothing and can do nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man, being the servant and interpreter of nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in ...the course of nature: beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For passion, be it observed, brings insight with it; it can give a sort of intelligence to simpletons, fools, and idiots, especial...ly during youth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"To my thinking" boomed the Professor, begging the question as usual, "the greatest triumph of the human mind was the calculation ...of Neptune from the observed vagaries of the orbit of Uranus." "And yours," said the P.B.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taking food alone tends to make one hard and coarse. Those accustomed to it must lead a Spartan life if they are not to go downhil...l. Hermits have observed, if for only this reason, a frugal diet. For it is only in company that eating is done justice; food must be divided and distributed if it is to be well received.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »