Up the reputable walks of old established trees They stalk, children of the nouveaux riches; chimes... Of the tall Clock Tower drench their heads in blessing: "I don't wanna play at your house; I don't like you any more." My house stands opposite, on the other hill,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The modern Christian is a man who has consented to say all the prayers in the liturgy, provided you will let him go straight to be...d and sleep quiet afterward. All his prayers begin with "Now I lay me down to sleep," and he is forever looking forward to the time when he shall go to his "long rest." He has consented to perform certain old-established charities, too, after a fashion, but he does not wish to hear of any new-fangled ones; he does n't wish to have any supplementary articles added to the contract, to fit it to the present time. He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week. The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation of spirit as well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When autonomy is respected, the two-year-old does not carry this unfinished task into later stages of growth. In adolescence, the ...youngster will again concentrate on independence, but he won't have to blast the roof off the second time around if it is already well established.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In old Egypt, it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal to a hundred hands. I think it was much under-e...stimated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By Jesus's time the Law of Moses, originally established for the government of a semi-barbarous nation of herdsmen and hill-farmer...s, resembled a petulant great-grandfather who tries to govern a family business from his sick-bed in the chimney-corner, unaware of the changes that have taken place in the world since he was able to get about: his authority must not be questioned, yet his orders, since no longer relevant, must be reinterpreted in another sense, if the business is not to go bankrupt. When the old man says, for instance: "It is time for the women to grind their lapfuls of millet in the querns", this is taken to mean: "It is time to send the sacks of wheat to the water-mill."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scientists tend to be ... Utopian in temperament--to believe in the possibility in principle, perhaps even in fact, of a different... and altogether better world. The great days of Utopian thinking were the days when voyages of discovery on the earth's surface had the same significance as space travel has today. The old Utopias--New Atlantis, Christianopolis and the City of the Sun--were faraway contemporary societies, but the Utopias men dream of today lie in the distant future or on a planet of a distant faraway sun. Arcadian thinking looks not forward nor far away but backward to a golden age that could yet return. Arcadia is a world of innocence not yet corrupted by ambition and inquiry, a world of pious acquiescence in the established order of things, without strife and without ambition--a world of "truth and honest living." Milton, whom I quote, saw it as the purpose of education "to repair the ruins of our first parents," to return to the happy innocence of the world before the Fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
English talk is often very short, very much shorter than ours. This is because they all understand each other, are much closer kni...t than we are. Behind them are generations of "doing it" in the same established way, a way that their long experience of life has hammered out for their own convenience, and which they like. We're not nearly so closely knit together here, save in certain spots, especially the old spots. In Boston they understand each other with very few words said. So they do in Charleston. But these spots of condensed and hoarded understanding lie far apart, are never confluent, and also differ in their details; while the whole of England is confluent, and details have been slowly worked out through centuries of getting on together, and are accepted and observed exactly like the rules of the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is it to grow old? Is it to lose the glory of the form,... The luster of the eye? Is it for beauty to forego her wreath? MYes, but not this alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was only one woman alone, and had no power to move to action full-fed, sleek- coated, ease-loving, pleasure-seeking, well-paid, ...and well-placed countrymen in this war- trampled, dead, old land, each one afraid that he should be called upon to do something.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »