Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
|
And when the Salmon seeks a fresher stream to find; (Which hither from the sea comes, yearly, by his kind,) As he towards season grows; and stems the watry tract Where Tivy, falling down, makes an high cataract, Forc'd by the rising rocks that there her course oppose, As tho' within her bounds they meant her to inclose; Here when the labouring fish does at the foot arrive, And finds that by his strength he does but vainly strive; His tail takes in his mouth, and, bending like a bow That's to full compass drawn, aloft himself doth throw, Then springing at his height, as doth a little wand That bended end to end, and started from man's hand, Far off itself doth cast, so does that Salmon vault; And if, at first, he fail, his second summersault He instantly essays, and, from his nimble ring Still yerking, never leaves until himself he fling Above the opposing stream.
|
Another time I go outside Into the world. It rocks on and on. It was rocking before I saw it And is presumably doing so still.
|
The original story, whatever it was, was told to those who forgot some details and substituted others. The original is long lost in the restorations. They have had the composer accompanied by a gifted sister, who, the inflexible record shows, died years before the song was written. They have seated him at the prim old spindle-legged mahogany desk in the hall at Federal Hill and had him dash it off in the frenzy of inspiration. Or they have followed him to the rocks of the old spring house, whither they have sent him, pencil in hand, and counted the frowns of agony with which he laboriously set down now a strain of melody and again a phrase of words. They have heard him trying it out with the deep booming bass voice of him who had never more than a weak but sweet light baritone. Every writer of it has himself for the hero and has described it as he would himself have acted it before the grand audience of posterity. These various stories cling about Federal Hill, the outgrowth of the human desire for contact with the vague figures of the past.
|
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.
|
Difficulty, my brethren, is the nurse of greatness-a harsh nurse, who roughly rocks her foster-children into strength and athletic proportion.
|
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.N.B. This quote is commonly misquoted as savage beast.
|
Music has charms to soothe the savage breast To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
|
The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.
|
How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of ignorance.
|
The Solitary answered: Such a Form Full well I recollect. We often crossed Each other's path; but, as the Intruder seemed Fondly to prize the silence which he kept, And I as willingly did cherish mine, We met, and passed, like shadows. I have heard, From my good Host, that being crazed in brain By unrequited love, he scaled the rocks, Dived into caves, and pierced the matted woods, In hope to find some virtuous herb of power To cure his malady!
|
Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak. N.B.: This quote is commonly misquoted as savage beast.
|
My writing is like a ten gallon spring. It can issue from the ground anywhere at all. On smooth ground it rushes swiftly on and covers a thouasand li in a single day without difficulty. When it twists and turns among mountains and rocks, it fits its form to things it meets: unknowable. What can be known is, it always goes where it must go, always stops where it cannot help stopping -- nothing else. More than that, even I cannot know.
|
Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear; As seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.
|
There are two schools of thought on Nostradamus: either (1) he had supernatural powers which enabled him to prophesy the future with uncanny accuracy, or (2) he did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks.
|
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the nation and its destiny.
|
Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents,...
|
For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
|
Music has charms to soothe the savage breast
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
|
Anybody who would like to travel as an archaeologist of mores and observe men instead of rocks could find an image of the century of Louis XV in some village in Provence, that of Louis XIV in Poitou, that of even more remote times in the far reaches of Brittany. Most of these cities have fallen from some splendor that historians, more preoccupied with dates than customs, no longer speak of, but whose memory lives on, such as in Brittany, where the national character scarcely accepts the forgetting of what this country is fundamentally about. . . All of these cities have their primitive character.
|
... Nature, whose sweet rains fall of just and unjust alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undetected. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
|
The trebling of the population in this small and impoverished country, flowing with milk and honey but not with sufficient water, rich in rocks and sand dunes but poor in natural resources and vital raw materials, has been no easy task Indeed, practical men, with their eyes fixed upon things as they are, regarded it as an empty and insubstantial utopian dream.
|
You dehumanize a man as much by returning him to nature - by making him one with rocks, vegetation, and animals - as by turning him into a machine. Both the natural and the mechanical are the opposite of that which is uniquely human. Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines. It is also obvious that when man domesticated animals and plants he acquired self-made machines for the production of food, power, and beauty.
|
If you see a whole thing - it seems that it's always beautiful. Planets, lives.... But close up a world's all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life's a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
|
The Rock of Ages is more important than the age of rocks
|
Sometimes we want to get away from the busy and hectic city life to find solace in the raging waves of the ocean pounding on the rocks or the turbulent splashing of a bubbling waterfall. At other times we are amazed by the immovable silence of a mountain or the gentle caress of a river overjoyed tat its union with the sea. The topography of a region speaks to each one of us--a secret language that people from all facets of life understand and relate to.
|
A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.
|
Call on God, but row away from the rocks
|
The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot, who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.
|
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
|