We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments t...hat pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a pastoral game, baseball attempts to close the gap between the players and the crowd. It creates the illusion, for instance, t...hat with a lot a hard work, a little luck, and possibly some extra talent, the average spectator might well be playing; not watching. For most of us can do a few of the things that ball players can do: catch a pop-up, field a ground ball, and maybe get a hit once in a while.... As a heroic game, football is not concerned with a shared community of near-equals. It seeks almost the opposite relationship between its spectators and players, one which stresses the distance between them. We are not allowed to identify directly with Jim Brown any more than we are with Zeus, because to do so would undercut his stature as something more than human.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers ...of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come down which deserve to last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significa...nce of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Miss Dudley ... gives one the idea of a lightly-sparred yacht in mid- ocean; unexpected; you ask yourself what the devil she is d...oing there. She sails gaily along, though there is no land in sight and plenty of rough weather coming. She never read a book, I believe, in her life. She tries to paint, but she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more, though she has done one or two things which I give you my word I would like to have done myself. She picks up all she knows without an effort and knows nothing well, yet she seems to understand whatever is said. Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity. I notice that the lines of her eyebrows, nose and mouth all end with a slight upward curve like a yacht's sails, which gives a kind of hopefulness and self-confidence to her expression. Mind and face have the same curves."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Soon, in all parts of our country, in each neglected village, or new settlement, the Christian female teacher will quietly take he...r station, collecting the ignorant children around her, teaching them habits of neatness, order and thrift; opening the book of knowledge, inspiring the principles of morality, and awakening the hope of immortality. Soon her influence in the village will create a demand for new laborers, and then she will summon from among her friends at home, the nurse for the young and sick, the seamstress and the mantuamaker; and these will prove her auxiliaries in good moral influence, and in sabbath school training. And often as the result of these labors, the Church will arise, and the minister of Christ be summoned to fill up the complement of domestic, moral and religious blessing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school w...as taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought... to be a book written about me, that there ought! And when I grow up, I'll write one--but I'm grown up now," she added in a sorrowful tone: "At least there's no room to grow up any more here."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »