I ask myself: what are my views on death, the next world, God? I look into my mind and discover I am too much of a mannikin to hav...e any. As for death, I am a little bit of trembling jelly of anticipation. I am prepared for anything, but I am the complete agnostic; I simply don't know. To have views, faith, beliefs, one needs a backbone. This great bully of a universe overwhelms me. The stars make me cower. I am intimidated by the immensity surrounding my own littleness. It is futile and presumptuous for me to opine anything about the next world. But I hope for something much freer and more satisfying after death, for emancipation of the spirit and above all for the obliteration of this puny self, this little, skulking, sharp-witted ferret.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I speak for an art ... weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the sam...e old thing, of going a little further along a dreary road.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, casts its wealth to right and left, but... the puny boatmen do not know how to fish for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget. Easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and essential worth, but not when you're three ...feet tall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The theories and speculations of men concern us more than their puny accomplishment. It is with a certain coldness and languor tha...t we loiter about the actual and so-called practical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a mossy swamp, which it required the long legs of a moose to traverse, and it is very likely that we scared some of them in... our transit, though we saw none. It was ready to echo the growl of a bear, the howl of a wolf, or the scream of a panther; but when you get fairly into the middle of one of these grim forests, you are surprised to find that the larger inhabitants are not at home commonly, but have left only a puny red squirrel to bark at you.... I did, however, see one dead porcupine; perhaps he had succumbed to the difficulties of the way. These bristly fellows are a very suitable small fruit of such unkempt wildernesses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well.... In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »