He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exa...ct than anything they may say. He is impelled by inertia, rather than curiosity, and nothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded ho...pe, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, pa...rtly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed "unwittingly," the writer scowli...ng naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I met the first of my three or four successive wives in somewhat odd circumstances, the development of which resembled a clumsy co...nspiracy, with nonsensical details and a main plotter who not only knew nothing of its real object but insisted on making inept moves that seemed to preclude the slightest possibility of success. Yet out of those very mistakes he unwittingly wove a web, in which a set of reciprocal blunders on my part caused me to get involved and fulfill the destiny that was the only aim of the plot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond, in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acqu...ainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this centre, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drank at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden Walden Pond was already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them. Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clarified its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear, and obtained a patent of Heaven to be the only Walden Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this has been the Castalian Fountain? or what nymphs presided over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water which Concord wears in her coronet. Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters, and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the present occupants of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though the Negroes are fed, clothed, and housed, and though the Irish peasant is starved, naked, and roofless, the bare name of fr...eemen--the lordship over his own person, the power to choose and will--are blessings beyond food, raiment, or shelter; possessing which, the want of every comfort of life is yet more tolerable than their fullest enjoyment without them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ... really think I should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut if some night the people were to take it into... their head to clear off scores in that fashion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I cannot help being astonished at the furious and ungoverned execration which all reference to the possibility of a fusion of t...he races draws down upon those who suggest it, because nobody pretends to deny that, throughout the South, a large proportion of the population is the offspring of white men and colored women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »