I am willing, for a money consideration, to test this physical strength, this nervous force, and muscular power with which I've be...en gifted, to show that they will bear a certain strain. If I break down, if my brain gives way under want of sleep, my heart ceases to respond to the calls made on my circulatory system, or the surcharged veins of my extremities burst--if, in short, I fall helpless, or it may be, dead on the track, then I lose my money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by... believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law, And argued each case with my wife;... And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw, Has lasted the rest of my life."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death,... a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The genius of the Saxon race, friendly to liberty; the enterprise, the very muscular vigor of this nation, are inconsistent with s...lavery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece o...f bread down his throat, he would starve.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare,--muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and wor...ks that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human life, love..., fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or th...ey behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »