Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can ste...p out of a railway station--the Gare D'Orsay--and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees--nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobster pot, the broken oar... And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents--about like... a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and "the rest of mankind," are growled about in "old-soldier" style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We camped about two miles below Nicketow, on the south side of the West Branch, covering with fresh twigs the withered bed of a fo...rmer traveler, and feeling that we were now in a settled country, especially when in the evening we heard an ox sneeze in its wild pasture across the river. Wherever you land along the frequented part of the river, you have not far to go to find these sites of temporary inns, the withered bed of flattened twigs, the charred sticks, and perhaps the tent-poles. And not long since, similar beds were spread along the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware, and longer still ago, by the Thames and Seine, and they now help to make the soil where private and public gardens, mansions, and palaces are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only dan...ger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowle...dge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Port...ugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, bu...t, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces--in the beginning, there was spice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesque... moments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »