LOOKING-GLASS, n. A vitreous plane upon which to display a fleeting show for man's disillusion given. The King of Manchuria had a magic looking-glass, whereon whoso looked saw, not his own image, but only that of the king. A certain courtier who had long enjoyed the king's favor and was thereby enriched beyond any other subject of the realm, said to the king: Give me, I pray, thy wonderful mirror, so that when absent out of thine august presence I may yet do homage before thy visible shadow, prostrating myself night and morning in the glory of thy benign countenance, as which nothing has so divine splendor, O Noonday Sun of the Universe! Please with the speech, the king commanded that the mirror be conveyed to the courtier's palace; but after, having gone thither without apprisal, he found it in an apartment where was naught but idle lumber. And the mirror was dimmed with dust and overlaced with cobwebs. This so angered him that he fisted it hard, shattering the glass, and was sorely hurt. Enraged all the more by this mischance, he commanded that the ungrateful courtier be thrown into prison, and that the glass be repaired and taken back to his own palace; and this was done. But when the king looked again on the mirror he saw not his image as before, but only the figure of a crowned ass, having a bloody bandage on one of its hinder hooves --as the artificers and all who had looked upon it had before discerned but feared to report. Taught wisdom and charity, the king restored his courtier to liberty, had the mirror set into the back of the throne and reigned many years with justice and humility; and one day when he fell asleep in death while on the throne, the whole court saw in the mirror the luminous figure of an angel, which remains to this day.
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Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through
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There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.
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Solon used to say that speech was the image of actions... that laws were like cobwebs, --for that if any trifling or powerless thing fell into them, they held it fast while if it were something weightier, it broke through them and was off.
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Cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow For babies grow up, we've learned to our sorrow So quiet down, cobwebs Dust, go to sleep I'm rocking my baby, and babies don't keep.
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Truth is by nature self-evident. As soon as you remove the cobwebs of ignorance that surround it, it shines clear.
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Habits are cobwebs at first; cables at last.
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I can look sharp as well as another, and let me alone to keep the cobwebs out of my eyes.
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Laughter is the brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of the heart.
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