As the light increased, I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and ...shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland; a situation which required no aid from the imagination to render it impressive. As the light in the east steadily increased, it revealed to me more clearly the new world into which I had risen in the night, the new terra firma perchance of my future life.... All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We say justly that the weak person is flat, for, like all flat substances, he does not stand in the direction of his strength, tha...t is, on his edge, but affords a convenient surface to put upon. He slides all the way through life.... But the brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side and is equally strong every way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amuseme...nt of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface. Everything seems to me to come from the Infinite, to be filled with the Infinite, to be tending toward the Infinite. Do I see crowds of men hastening to extinguish a fire? I see not merely uncouth garbs, and fantastic, flickering lights, of lurid hue, like a trampling troop of gnomes--but straightway my mind is filled with thoughts about mutual helpfulness, human sympathy, the common bond of brotherhood, and the mysteriously deep foundations on which society rests; or rather, on which it now reels and totters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A lifeless planet. And yet, yet still serving a useful purpose, I hope. Yes, a sun. Warming the surface of some other world. Givin...g light to those who may need it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the cold of Europe, under prudish northern fogs, except when slaughter is afoot, you only glimpse the crawling cruelty of your ...fellow men. But their rottenness rises to the surface as soon as they are tickled by the hideous fevers of the tropics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his awful dread... of death showed how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared to penetrate further than to ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness.... Dr. Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that ...is already alive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scientists tend to be ... Utopian in temperament--to believe in the possibility in principle, perhaps even in fact, of a different... and altogether better world. The great days of Utopian thinking were the days when voyages of discovery on the earth's surface had the same significance as space travel has today. The old Utopias--New Atlantis, Christianopolis and the City of the Sun--were faraway contemporary societies, but the Utopias men dream of today lie in the distant future or on a planet of a distant faraway sun. Arcadian thinking looks not forward nor far away but backward to a golden age that could yet return. Arcadia is a world of innocence not yet corrupted by ambition and inquiry, a world of pious acquiescence in the established order of things, without strife and without ambition--a world of "truth and honest living." Milton, whom I quote, saw it as the purpose of education "to repair the ruins of our first parents," to return to the happy innocence of the world before the Fall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if... he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »