He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.... He must not be afraid to return again and... again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand--like precious fragments or torsos in a collector's gallery--in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks the wonderful congruity which subsists between man and th...e world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beliefs constitute the basic stratum, that which lies deepest, in the architecture of our life. By them we live, and by the same t...oken we rarely think of them.... One may symbolize the individual life as a bank of issue. The bank lives on the credit of a gold reserve which is rarely seen, which lies at the bottom of metal coffers hidden in the vaults of the building. The most elementary caution will suggest that from time to time the effective condition of these guaranties--of these credences, one might say, that are the basis of credit--be passed in review.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events whi...ch make the news transpire--thinner than the paper on which it is printed--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events that make the news transpire,--thinner... than the paper on which it is printed,--then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging t...he grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and my life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and ...antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,--not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »