If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in hi...s rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from ...the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It might sound a paradoxical thing to say--for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental tim...e--but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid the struggles with you that would have fed your true strength. We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us w...ith our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution--then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The si...des are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very pleasing effect. When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion--the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian fresco. Nothing in this world has such a charm for me as to stand and gaze for hours and hours upon the inspired works of these old masters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mrs. Small went to the kitchen for her pocketbook And came back to the living room with a peculiar look... And the coffee pot. Pocketbook. Pot. Pot. Pocketbook.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take... Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »