Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as... many topics to the tongue.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness--there can be no doubt of that--morality will gradually perish now: this is the... great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe--the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I should say that he was an old-fashioned man in his respect for the Constitution, and his faith in the permanence of this Union. ...Slavery he deemed to be wholly opposed to these, and he was its determined foe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished.... ...But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humanities, and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This world has many rings, like Saturn, and we live now on the outmost of them all. None can say deliberately that he inhabits the... same sphere, or is contemporary, with the flower which his hands have plucked, and though his feet may seem to crush it, inconceivable spaces and ages separate them, and perchance there is no danger that he will hurt it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That is a pathetic inquiry among travelers and geographers after the site of ancient Troy. It is not near where they think it is. ...When a thing is decayed and gone, how indistinct must be the place it occupied!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the min...d. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun, moon, and stars, and shall not see clearly till after nine days at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The anecdotes of modern astronomy affect me in the same way as do those faint revelations of the Real which are vouchsafed to men ...from time to time, or rather from eternity to eternity. When I remember the history of that faint light in our firmament which we call Venus, which ancient men regarded, and which most modern men still regard, as a bright spark attached to a hollow sphere revolving about our earth, but which we have discovered to be another world, in itself,--how Copernicus, reasoning long and patiently about the matter, predicted confidently concerning it, before yet the telescope had been invented,... and that within a century after his death the telescope was invented, and that prediction verified, by Galileo,--I am not without hope that we may, even here and now, obtain some accurate information concerning that OTHER WORLD which the instinct of mankind has so long predicted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »