“I would have you call to mind the strength of the ancient giants, that undertook to lay the high mountain Pelion on the top of Ossa, and set among those the shady Olympus.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fourth Book (1548, 1552), Chapter 38.
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Francois Rabelais 105
major French Renaissance writer 1494–1553Related quotes
Source: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz & Other Stories
As quoted in A New Mountain to Climb: Heroes I've Met and the Mountains They Climb Every Day (2010), by Neal McCoy, p. 72
Source: Drenai series, Quest for Lost Heroes, Ch. 1
"1925-1930" http://books.google.com/books?id=Zvi195aKdvMC&q=%22Never+measure+the+height+of+a+mountain+until+you+have+reached+the+top+then+you+will+see+how+low+it+was%22&pg=PA3#v=onepage
Markings (1964)
Source: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks (posthumous), p. 32
Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941) <!-- Duell, Sloan, & Pearce publishers -->
Context: If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization … go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.
They judged that, indisputably, by the study of these disciplines not only was the tongue refined, but also the wildness and barbarity of people’s minds was amended.
Source: Praise of Eloquence (1523), p. 66
“High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousandfold.”
Notes on a postcard to Clara Schumann (12 September 1868)