Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet b...aits. In larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Prima facie, if you should liken the universe of absolute idealism to an aquarium, a crystal globe in which goldfish are swimming,... you would have to compare the empiricist universe to something more like one of those dried human heads with which the Byaks of Borneo deck their lodges. The skull forms a solid nucleus; but innumerable feathers, leaves, strings, beads, and loose appendices of every description float and dangle from it, and, save that they terminate in it, seem to have nothing to do with one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--from my heart, from th...e tender nucleus of a personal matter--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness sees a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know that the nucleus of a time is not The poet but the poem, the growth of the mind... Of the world, the heroic effort to live expressed As victory. The poet does not speak in ruins Nor stand there making orotund consolations. He shares the confusions of intelligence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could not undertake to form a nucleus of an institution for the development of infant minds, where none already existed. It woul...d be too cruel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a dee...p cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale.... When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the lacinated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopard's paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »