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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #nation
What happened next? I retain nothing from those terrible minutes except indistinct memories which flash into my mind with sudden brutality, like apparitions, among bursts and scenes and visions that are scarcely imaginable. It is difficult even to even to try to remember moments during which nothing is considered, foreseen, or understood, when there is nothing under a steel helmet but an astonishingly empty head and a pair of eyes which translate nothing more than would the eyes of an animal facing mortal danger. There is nothing but the rhythm of explosions, more or less distant, more or less violent, and the cries of madmen, to be classified later, according to the outcome of the battle, as the cries of heroes or of murderers. And there are the cries of the wounded, of the agonizingly dying, shrieking as they stare at a part of their body reduced to pulp, the cries of men touched by the shock of battle before everybody else, who run in any and every direction, howling like banshees. There are the tragic, unbelievable visions, which carry from one moment of nausea to another: guts splattered across the rubble and sprayed from one dying man to another; tightly riveted machines ripped like the belly of a cow which has just been sliced open, flaming and groaning; trees broken into tiny fragments; gaping windows pouring out torrents of billowing dust, dispersing into oblivion all that remains of a comfortable parlor... ↗
His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not. ↗
#inspiration #nature #poetry #samuel-taylor-coleridge #senses
Hence, when we ask anything of God and He begins to hear us, He so often goes counter to our petitions that we imagine He is more angry with us now than before we prayed, and that He intends not to grant us our requests at all. All this God does, because it is His way first to destroy and annihilate what is in us before He gives us His gifts; for so we read in I Samuel 2:6: “The Lord killeth, and maketh alive: he bringeth down to the grave, and bringeth up.” Through this most gracious counsel He makes us fit for His gifts and works. Only then are we qualified for His works and counsels when our own plans have been demolished and our own works are destroyed and we have become purely passive in our relation to Him. ↗
What a strange thing it is to wake up to a milk-white overcast June morning! The sun is hidden by a thick cotton blanket of clouds, and the air is vapor-filled and hazy with a concentration of blooming scent. The world is somnolent and cool, in a temporary reprieve from the normal heat and radiance. But the sensation of illusion is strong. Because the sun can break through the clouds at any moment . . . What a soft thoughtful time. In this illusory gloom, like a night-blooming flower, let your imagination bloom in a riot of color. ↗
Come on, Princess," he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of them, but no man could fairly say she was too wide. The most that could be said was that she did not have much further to go before she would have to start squeezing it in and strapping it up, which she clearly did not do now. She let it hang where it was, and it did very nicely by itself. As she passed among the boys they looked her over with unconcealed envy, as though they knew she had something they didn't have but were not quite sure what it was. One thing was certain, she got more exercise than they did. The next to be noticed were her braids, they hung forward over her terrain, ignoring as much as possible her contours, like two shiny black meridianal lines demarking her longitudes as far down as the equator. It was not hard to imagine oneself spending a long lifetime on that bare little island alone, with no plan or ambition, too overcome with the heat to continue on south to the pole, far less return to the continents. Nothing productive could ever be accomplished there, but there would be comfort such as few men have known, there would be torpor. The body swelled with such thoughts, the mind shrank from them, and the longing eyes traveled finally up north, to where those meridians came together at a point above a bland white area vaguely charted, with few landmarks, no doubt sparsely inhabited. There the imagination halted. ↗
Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida está dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible muy lejos. Sin embargo está ahí, no hostil, no a disgusto, no sordo, viene si uno lo llama con la palabra correcta, por su nombre correcto, Es la esencia de la magia, que no crea, sino llama. ↗
si tu examines mon empire tu t'en iras voir les forgerons et les trouveras forgeant des clous et se passionnant pour les clous et te chantant les cantiques de la clouterie. Puis tu t'en iras voir les bucherons et tu les trouveras abattant arbres et se passionnant pour l'abattage d'arbres, et se remplissant d'une intense jubilation à l'heure de la fête du bucheron, qui est du premier craquement, lorsque la majesté de l'arbre commence de se prosterner. Et si tu vas voir les astronaumes, tu les verras se passionnant pour les étoiles et n'écoutant plus que leur silence. Et en effet chacun s'imagine être tel. Maintenant si je te demande: "Que se passe-t-il dans mon empire, que naîtra-t-il demain chez moi?" tu me diras: "On forgera des clous, on abattra des arbres, on observera les étoiles et il y aura donc des réserves de clous, des réserves de bois et des observations d'étoiles." Car myope et le nez contre, tu n'as point reconnu la construction d'un navire. (chapitre CXVII) ↗
