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“Among all the nations of the Oriental world, only Israel developed an eschatology . . .”
Hans K. LaRondelle, The Israel of God in Prophecy: Principles of Prophetic Interpretation (Berrien Springs: Andrews University Press, 1983), 35; citing H. D. Preuss, Jahweglaube und Zukunftserwartung, BEANT 7 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1964).
“A dozen men are shut up together in a little bark upon the wide, wide sea, and for months and months see no forms and hear no voices but their own, and one is taken suddenly from among them, and they miss him at every turn. It is like losing a limb. There are no new faces of new scenes to fill up the gap. . . . You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
George Ballmer, a fellow-sailor, is working high above the deck of a ship on the maintop masthead, when he falls into the ocean with his equipment. He is lost completely; Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (New York: Signet, 2000), 31.
“We were like tram-cars running on their lines from terminus to terminus, and it was possible to calculate within small limits the number of passengers they would carry. Life was ordered too pleasantly.”
Sometimes boredom gets the best of us and, like Maugham, we need to change locations (in his case, from London to Paris). W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 63.
“There was a time when fox-hunting was the greatest sport in this country, but it has long since been replaced by divorce.”
Lloyd-Jones; Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: The First Forty Years, 1899-1939 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2002), 66.
“Sir: It is true I have omitted answering some of your letters. I do not like to answer angry letters. I hate disputes. I am old, cannot have long to live, have much to do and no time for altercation. If I have often received and borne your magisterial snubbings and rebukes without reply, ascribe it to the right causes, my concern for the honor & success of our mission, which would be hurt by our quarrelling, my love of peace, my respect for your good qualities, and my pity of your sick mind, which is forever tormenting itself, with its jealousies, suspicions & fancies that others mean you ill, wrong you, or fail in respect for you. If you do not cure your self of this temper it will end in insanity, of which it is the symptomatic forerunner, as I have seen in several instances. God preserve you from so terrible an evil: and for His sake pray suffer me to live in quiet.”
Letter written in 1778 by Benjamin Franklin (his angriest ever, says Isaacson) to Arthur Lee of Virginia, a fellow commissioner to France; Cited in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 332.
“He also told the story of some Massachusetts commissioners who invited the Indians to send a dozen of their youth to study free at Harvard. The Indians replied that they had sent some of their young braves to study there years earlier, but on their return ‘they were absolutely good for nothing, being neither acquainted with the true methods for killing deer, catching beaver, or surprising an enemy.’ They offered instead to educate a dozen or so white children in the ways of the Indians ‘and make men of them.’”
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 153; citing Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Peter Collinson, May 9, 1753.
“As the election of 1764 showed, American democracy was built on a foundation of unbridled free speech. In the centuries since then, the nations that have thrived have been those, like America, that are most comfortable with the cacophony, and even occasional messiness, that comes from robust discourse.”
Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 217.
“The intimacy which is contracted in infancy, and the friendship which is formed in misfortune, are, of all others, the most lasting and unalterable. Our present union is marked with both these characters: we are young, and we have been distressed; but our concord hath withstood our troubles, and fixes a memorable aera [sic.] for posterity to glory in.”
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 2nd printing of Feb. 14, 1776 as edited by Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1986), 108.
“. . . as Plato says, the written word is only a poor faint shadow of real conversation, in which, among people who know each other well, the merest suggestion explains a train of thought which the most elaborate written explanation leaves obscure, lifeless and formal.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 130; writing to his father, dated 18 June, 1915, and citing Phaedrus, 278a.
