This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management of ...external things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This noon his mind was occupied with a law question, and I referred him to my companion, who was a lawyer. It appeared that he had... been buying land lately (I think it was a hundred acres), but there was probably an incumbrance to it, somebody else claiming to have bought some grass on it for this year. He wished to know to whom the grass belonged, and was told that if the other man could prove that he bought the grass before he, Polis, bought the land, the former could take it, whether the latter knew it or not. To which he only replied, "Strange!" He went over this several times, fairly sat down to it, with his back to a tree, as if he meant to confine us to this topic henceforth; but as he made no headway, only reached the jumping-off place of his wonder at white men's institutions after each explanation, we let the subject die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I take it that the good of mankind means the attainment, by every man, of all the happiness which he can enjoy without diminishing... the happiness of his fellow men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is the sinner's dust-tongued bell claps me to churches When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulphur priest,... His beast heel cleft in a sandal....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belon...gs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »