Rivers must have been the guides which conducted the footsteps of the first travelers. They are the constant lure, when they flow ...by our doors, to distant enterprise and adventure; and, by a natural impulse, the dwellers on their banks will at length accompany their currents to the lowlands of the globe, or explore at their invitation the interior of continents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For many people religion is a rigid concept, somewhat like a stone that is passed from generation to generation. We don't add to i...t, change it, or challenge it; we just pass it along. But even the most cursory study of the history of religions would undermine such a view. Religious traditions are far more like rivers than stones. Like the Ganges or the Gallatin, they are flowing or changing. Sometimes they dry up in arid land; sometimes they radically change course and move out to water new territory. All of us contribute to the river of our traditions. We do not know how we will change the river or be changed as we experience its currents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, ...as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Archetypes resemble the beds of rivers: dried up because the water has deserted them, though it may return at any time. An archety...pe is something like an old watercourse along which the water of life flowed for a time, digging a deep channel for itself. The longer it flowed the deeper the channel, and the more likely it is that sooner or later the water will return.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revo...lution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizons; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove... That hills and valleys, dales and fields, Or woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks, And see the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the moon looks larger here than in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America appear infinitely high...er, and the stars brighter, I trust that these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar.... I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more etheral, as our sky,--our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,--our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,--and our hearts shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something ... of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America discovered?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »