Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, and the years draw near when you will say, "I ha...ve no pleasure in them"; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return with the rain; in the day when the guards of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the women who grind cease working because they are few, and those who look through the windows see dimly; when the doors on the street are shut, and the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low; when one is afraid of heights, and terrors are in the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails; because all must go to their eternal home, and the mourners will go about the streets; before the silver cord is snapped, and the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the breath returns to God who gave it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I want to go back, out of the bad stories, But there's always the possibility that the next one . . .... No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog . . . Yet they are beautiful as we people them With ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes: A thing, as the Bellman remarked,... That frequently happens in tropical climes When a vessel is, so to speak, "snarked."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxur...y of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--a...n almond tree or an oil well?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, you'll love the sea. There's something about it. The hot red dawn, the towering sails, the wake on a tropical night. Oh, you'l...l love it all. It's a glorious kind of world. I couldn't live without it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wildness and silence disappeared from the countryside, sweetness fell from the air, not because anyone wished them to vanish or fa...ll but because throughways had to floor the meadows with cement to carry the automobiles which advancing technology produced.... Tropical beaches turned into high-priced slums where thousand-room hotels elbowed each other for glimpses of once-famous surf not because those who loved the beaches wanted them there but because enormous jets could bring a million tourists every year--and therefore did.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If there is anything so romantic as that castle-palace-fortress of Monaco I have not seen it. If there is anything more delicious ...than the lovely terraces and villas of Monte Carlo I do not wish to see them. There is nothing beyond the semi-tropical vegetation, the projecting promontories into the Mediterranean, the all-embracing sweep of the ocean, the olive groves, and the enchanting climate! One gets tired of the word beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »