I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the an...tique and future worlds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... when a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and, throwing a roll of tobac...co into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, "Here gurl," (I am past thirty) "you better git out 'n dis kyar 'f yer don't, I'll put yer out"Mmy mental annotation is Here's an American citizen who has been badly trained. He is sadly lacking in both "sweetness" and "light" ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore ...useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be motivated to sit at home and study, instead of going out and playing, children need a sense of themselves over time--they ne...ed to be able to picture themselves in the future.... If they can't, then they're simply reacting to daily events, responding to the needs of the moment--for pleasure, for affiliation, for acceptance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hm, the beacon of the press. In the hell to which all journalists must descend when they die, Mr. Wiggam, we shall sit at red hot ...desks with quills of fire in our hand and spend eternity on eternity writing about the salubrious weather of that region. Let us serve our apprenticeship here thoroughly and intelligently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some men are judges, these August days, sitting on benches, even till the court rises; they sit judging there honorably, between t...he seasons and between meals, leading a civil, politic life, arbitrating ... it may be, from highest noon until the red vesper sinks into the west. The fisherman, meanwhile, stands in three feet of water, under the same summer's sun, arbitrating in other cases between muck-worm and shiner, amid the fragrance of water-lilies, mint, and pontederia, leading his life many rods from the dry land, within a pole's length of where the larger fishes swim. Human life is to him very much like a river.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women an...d girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers' wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher's ear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all l...ife, all races and breeds into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. At the feet of the tallest and plushest offices lie the crummiest slums. The genteel mysteries housed in the Riverside Church are only a few blocks from the voodoo charms of Harlem. The merchant princes, riding to Wall Street in their limousines down the East River Drive, pass within a few hundred yards of the gypsy kings; but the princes do not know they are passing the kings, and the kings are not up yet anyway--they live a more leisurely life than the princes and get drunk more consistently.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing o...f victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »