Such a perspective should enable us to understand the distance we hjlve traveled and where we are today.

As we approach the bicentennial of the independence of the United State

children’s hospital in the Republic of Malawi

carefully considered, pragmatic, and forward-looking

design as humans for humans in a global crisis

Abelard

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure—if they are, indeed, so well off—to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

consider how little this village does for its own culture

The solitary hired man on a farm in the outskirts of Concord, who has had his second birth and peculiar religious experience, and is driven as he believes into the silent gravity and exclusiveness by his faith, may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of years ago, travelled the same road and had the same experience

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book!

tit-men

deliquium

tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had ever loved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth

If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it.

Vaticans

Zendavestas

repeating our a-b-abs, and words of one syllable, in the fourth or fifth classes, sitting on the lowest and foremost form all our lives

Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.

memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity

I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself

my beans to hoe

Mîr Camar Uddîn Mast

The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things.

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake

Nilometer

point d’appui

let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry

Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.

Mill-dam

only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality

“Kieou-he-yu (great dignitary of the state of Wei) sent a man to Khoung-tseu to know his news. Khoung-tseu caused the messenger to be seated near him, and questioned him in these terms: What is your master doing? The messenger answered with respect: My master desires to diminish the number of his faults, but he cannot come to the end of them. The messenger being gone, the philosopher remarked: What a worthy messenger! What a worthy messenger!”

“What’s the news?”

we, be it known, did not set it on fire

Saint Vitus’ dance

sleepers

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do

All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.

Morning brings back the heroic ages.

“There was a shepherd that did live,                   And held his thoughts as high                As were the mounts whereon his flocks                   Did hourly feed him by.”

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.

The low shrub oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon”—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures.

,

I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.

if I except a boat

The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it. Olympus is but the outside of the earth everywhere.

by accident

I think I shall not buy greedily, but go round and round it as long as I live, and be buried in it first, that it may please me the more at last.

the only translation I have seen makes sheer nonsense of the passage

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.

a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone

some boobies and bumpkins there, who, by their intense greenness, must have come from the heart and centre of all verdure

that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records

see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them

there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast

I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world. This soothing savage had redeemed it.

He looked like a man who had never cringed and never had had a creditor

dearest

the first howling gale, when thou art driven, straps, buttons, and all, down the throat of the tempest

Queequeg, under the circumstances, this is a very civilized overture; but, the truth is, these savages have an innate sense of delicacy, say what you will; it is marvellous how essentially polite they are. I pay this particular compliment to Queequeg, because he treated me with so much civility and consideration, while I was guilty of great rudeness; staring at him from the bed, and watching all his toilette motions; for the time my curiosity getting the better of my breeding

21st June, the longest day in the year in our hemisphere

He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way.

the chimney jambs and all the bricks inside were very sooty, so that I thought this fire-place made a very appropriate little shrine or chapel for his Congo idol.

seemed inexplicable

monkey jackets

I got up and took off my monkey jacket, and then stood in the middle of the room thinking. I then took off my coat, and thought a little more in my shirt sleeves.

Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced

turning flukes

you, sir, you I mean, landlord, you, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to a criminal prosecution.

I never liked to sleep two in a bed; that if I should ever do so, it would depend upon who the harpooneer might be, and that if he (the landlord) really had no other place for me, and the harpooneer was not decidedly objectionable, why rather than wander further about a strange town on so bitter a night, I would put up with the half of any decent man’s blanket.

condemned old craft

cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment

formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago

Hardicanutes