Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now... direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, ...it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the mind, cast by the wings of some thought in its vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China grandeur. Those gra-a-ate thoughts, those gra-a-ate men you hear of!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But to consider this Subject in its most ridiculous Lights, Advertisements are of great Use to the Vulgar: First of all, as they a...re Instruments of Ambition. A Man that is by no Means big enough for the Gazette, may easily creep into the Advertisements.... A Second Use which this Sort of Writings have been turned to of late Years, has been the Management of Controversy, insomuch that above half the Advertisements one meets with now-a-Days are purely Polemical.... The Third and last Use of these Writings is, to inform the World where they may be furnished with almost every Thing that is necessary for Life. If a Man has Pains in his Head, Cholicks in his Bowels, or Spots in his Clothes, he may here meet with proper Cures and Remedies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you ever turned toward an intellectual in a time of authentic anguish and encountered his light appraisal, or evasion, of you...r grief? Or turned to him in a situation of light import only to be met with a heavy, superfluous solemnity?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It seems only yesterday that we saw The movie with the cows in it... And turned to one at your side, who burped As morning saw a new garnet-and-pea-green order propose Itself out of the endless bathos, like science-fiction lumps.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why the ghosts of poor old dead Romans should be dragged in every time a man eats an oyster, I don't see. We're as fine specimens ...as they were. I swear I shan't let any old turned-to-clay Lucullus outlive me, even if I've never eaten a lamprey.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gentleman took three or four strides across the room, looked out of the window once or twice, and then turned to me with an aw...kward bow and an irresistible air (as I fancy he thought it), and made me the polite compliment of telling me that he supposed my father had informed me that they two were agreed on a bargain. I replied, I did not know my father was of any trade or had any goods to dispose of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion, it ...stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them in exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings, whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moon was waiting for her chill effect. I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock... In every lifelike posture of the swarm, Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »