The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

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E.P. Dutton, 1903 - 279 pàgines
 

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Pàgina 11 - When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people labouring• to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how miserable a king must be ; and yet they all wish to be in his place.
Pàgina 188 - Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness ; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionably brutified ! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses ? It is not so.
Pàgina 41 - I am no friend of the people. As a force, by which the tenor of the time is .conditioned, they inspire me with distrust, with fear ; as a visible multitude, they make me shrink aloof, and often move me to abhorrence. . . . Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic, and I dread to think of what our England may become when Demos rules irresistibly.
Pàgina 42 - Take a man by himself, and there is generally some reason to be found in him, some disposition for good ; mass him with his fellows in the social organism, and ten to one he becomes a blatant creature, without a thought of his own, ready for any evil to which contagion prompts him. It is because nations tend to stupidity and baseness that mankind moves so slowly ; it is because individuals have a capacity for better things that it moves at all.
Pàgina viii - Kyecroft," is here among his characters, speaking of the things he has known, with the vexed courage of resignation. Naturally a man of independent and rather scornful spirit, he had suffered much from defeated ambition, from disillusions of many kinds, from subjection to grim necessity; the result of it, at the time of which I am speaking, was, certainly not a broken spirit, but a mind and temper so sternly disciplined, that, in ordinary intercourse with him, one did not know but that he led a calm,...
Pàgina 49 - ... then ? With a lifetime of dread experience behind me, I say that he who encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to literature, commits no less than a crime.
Pàgina 53 - Art as: an expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest of life. This is applicable to every form of Art devised by man, for, in his creative moment, whether he produce a great drama or carve a piece of foliage in wood, the artist is moved and inspired by supreme enjoyment of some aspect of the world about him ; an enjoyment...
Pàgina 253 - science" because of my conviction that, for long to come if not for ever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind. I see it destroying all simplicity and gentleness of life, all the beauty of the world ; I see it restoring barbarism under a mask of civilization; I see it darkening men's minds and hardening their hearts; I see it bringing a time of vast conflicts, which will pale into insignificance "the thousand wars of old...
Pàgina 64 - Unfortunately for this argument, education is a thing of which only the few are capable; teach as you will only a small percentage will profit by your most zealous energy.
Pàgina 46 - I had been without a care! It astounds me to remember that, having breakfasted on dry bread, and carrying in my pocket another piece of bread to serve for dinner, I settled myself at a desk in the great Reading Room with books before me which by no possibility could be a source of immediate profit. At such a time I worked through German tomes on Ancient Philosophy. At such a time, I read Appuleius and Lucian, Petronius and the Greek Anthology, Diogenes Laertius and — Heaven knows what! My hunger...

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