In excited conversation we have glimpses of the universe, hints of power native to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an ...Andes landscape, such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation. Here are oracles sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret of poetry is never explained--is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & t...he eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such, 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes ...us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,... omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page ... we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These marbles, the works of the dreamers and idealists of old, live on, leading and pointing to good. They are the works of vision...aries and dreamers, but they are realizations of soul, the representations of the ideal. They are grand, beautiful, and true, and they speak with a voice that echoes through the ages. Governments have changed; empires have fallen; nations have passed away; but these mute marbles remain--the oracles of time, the perfection of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They are the guiding oracles which man has found out for himself in that great business of ours, of learning how to be, to do, to ...do without, and to depart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Tried by a New England eye, or the more practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage; bu...t held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such ans...wers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My hope is ... that we may recover ... something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have sta...rted out with in the old days of the oracles, who communed with the intimations of divinity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »