Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me--and who knows whe...ther they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rome took all the vanity out of me; for after seeing the wonders there, I felt too insignificant to live, and gave up all my fooli...sh hopes in despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But it is the same thing we are all seeing, Our world. Go after it,... Go get it boy, says the man holding the stick. Eat, says the hunger, and we plunge blindly in again, Into the chamber behind the thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It mi...ght even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Murders are exciting and lift people into a heart-beating awe as religion is supposed to do, after seeing one in the street young ...couples will go back to bed and make love, people will cross themselves and thank God for the gift of their stuporous lives, old folks will talk to each other over cups of hot water with lemon because murders are enlivened sermons to be analyzed and considered and relished, they speak to the timid of the dangers of rebellion, murders are perceived as momentary descents of God and so provide joy and hope and righteous satisfaction to parishioners, who will talk about them for years afterward to anyone who will listen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as I gave the command to charge I felt a stunning blow and found a musket ball had struck my left arm just above the elbow. F...earing that an artery might be cut, I asked a soldier near me to tie my handkerchief above the wound. I soon felt weak, faint, and sick at the stomach. I laid down and was pretty comfortable ... [but] seeing something going wrong and feeling a little easier, I got up and began to give directions about things; but after a few moments, getting very weak, I again laid down. While I was lying down I had considerable talk with a wounded [Confederate] soldier lying near me. I gave him messages for my wife and friends in case I should not get up. We were right friendly and jolly; it was by no means an unpleasant experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew--... Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easy to talk of sitting at home contented, when others are seeing or making shows. But not to have been where it is supposed..., and seldom supposed falsely, that all would go if they could; to be able to say nothing when everyone is talking; to have no opinion when everyone is judging; to hear exclamations of rapture without power to depress; to listen to falsehoods without right to contradict, is, after all, a state of temporary inferiority, in which the mind is rather hardened by stubbornness, than supported by fortitude. If the world be worth winning let us enjoy it, if it is to be despised let us despise it by conviction. But the world is not to be despised but as it is compared with something better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »