“To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.”

Tears and Saints (1937)

The Teacher of Literature (1894)

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

古池や<br>蛙飛び込む<br>水の音 <br class="br">furu ike ya<br>kawazu tobikomu<br>mizu no oto <br class="br">Classical Japanese Database, Translation #64 http://carlsensei.com/classical/index.php/translation/view/64 (Translation: Reginald Horace Blyth) <br class="br">At the ancient pond<br>the frog plunges into<br>the sound of water <br class="br">Translation: Sam Hamill <br class="br">Old pond,<br>leap-splash &amp;ndash;<br>a frog. <br class="br">Basho, On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, London, 1985, p. 58 (Translation: Lucien Stryk) <br class="br">Breaking the silence<br>Of an ancient pond,<br>A frog jumped into water &amp;ndash;<br>A deep resonance. <br class="br">Matsuo Bashō, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, London, 1966, p. 9 (Translation: Nobuyuki Yuasa) <br class="br">Individual poems

Book of Haikus (2003)

Source: Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times

"The Fact in Fiction", p. 266. First published in Partisan Review (Summer 1960)
On the Contrary: Articles of Belief 1946–1961 (1961)

Source: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), pp. 49–50
Context: We are right to see power prestige and confidence as conditioned by the Civil War. But it is a very easy step to regard the War, therefore, as a jolly piece of luck only slightly disguised, part of our divinely instituted success story, and to think, in some shadowy corner of our mind, of the dead at Gettysburg as a small price to pay for the development of a really satisfactory and cheap compact car with decent pick-up and road-holding capability. It is to our credit that we survived the War and tempered our national fiber in the processs, but human decency and the future security of our country demand that we look at the costs. What are some of the costs?
Blood is the first cost. History is not melodrama, even if it usually reads like that. It was real blood, not tomato catsup or the pale ectoplasm of statistics, that wet the ground at Bloody Angle and darkened the waters of Bloody Pond. It modifies our complacency to look at the blurred and harrowing old photographs — the body of the dead sharpshooter in the Devil's Den at Gettysburg or the tangled mass in the Bloody Lane at Antietam.