I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
James Russell LowellRead
Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the connection between human truths and the eternal essence of great individuals.
James Russell Lowell suggests that profound truths are deeply embedded in the human spirit, and that individuals who embody these great truths possess a part of something timeless and universal. In essence, he implies that great souls transcend the limitations of their time and contribute to the eternal narrative of human existence.
In practice
During a motivational speech about the importance of self-discovery and personal growth.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
Human beings were put on the planet to depend upon their Creator and to worship their Creator at every point in every sphere of culture.
...Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts... and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.
There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.
And each day brings it's pretty dust, Our soon-choked souls to fll And we forget because we must, And not because we will.
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