Everyone nowadays lives through too much and thinks through too little: they have a ravenous appetite and colic at the same time s...o that they keep getting thinner and thinner no matter how much they eat.--Whoever says nowadays, "I have not experienced anything"--is a simpleton.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are many faculties in man, each of which takes its turn of activity, and that faculty which is paramount in any period and e...xerts itself through the strongest nation, determines the civility of that age: and each age thinks its own the perfection of reason.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, a...nd report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,--now under one disguise, now under another,--like a police in citizen's clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A body would think that your heart was as black as your face. People thinks now that sweeps is black all through instead of black ...all over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves--the fern and the needled pine and the lattice...d frond and the seaweed ribbon--perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. The flowers looking in from the walled garden through my window do not, it is true, see me. But their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. They take it, as it forever spills away radiant into space in a golden waste, to a primal purpose. They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements. They breathe upon the dust, and it is a rose. Say that this is done with neither thought nor passion, and by something other than will. True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Of the use and the beauty of flowering there can be no shade of doubt. It is a rare thought of which as much can be said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At length, by mid-afternoon, after we had had two or three rainbows over the sea, the showers ceased, and the heavens gradually cl...eared up, though the wind still blowed as hard and the breakers ran as high as before. Keeping on, we soon after came to a charity-house, which we looked into to see how the shipwrecked mariners might fare. Far away in some desolate hollow by the seaside, just within the bank, stands a lonely building on piles driven into the sand, with a slight nail put through the staple, which a freezing man can bend, with some straw, perchance, on the floor on which he may lie, or which he may burn in the fireplace to keep him alive. Perhaps this hut has never been required to shelter a shipwrecked man, and the benevolent person who promised to inspect it annually, to see that the straw and matches are here, and that the boards will keep off the wind, has grown remiss and thinks that storms and shipwrecks are over; and this very night a perishing crew may pry open its door with their numbed fingers and leave half their number dead here by morning. When I thought what must be the condition of the families which alone would ever occupy or had occupied them, what must have been the tragedy of the winter evenings spent by human beings around their hearths, these houses, though they were meant for human dwellings, did not look cheerful to me. They appeared but a stage to the grave. The gulls flew around and screamed over them; the roar of the ocean in storms, and the lapse of its waves in calms, alone resounds through them, all dark and empty within, year in, year out, except, perchance, on one memorable night. Houses of entertainment for shipwrecked men! What kind of sailor's homes were they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of coils, Unscrewed, released, no more to be marvelous,... I shall walk straightly through most proper halls Proper myself, princess of properness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a lit...tle (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give,... singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of heightLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »