
“This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains.”
A Morir [To Die]
Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 212.
Secondary Sources
“This is the age in which hills can look down upon the mountains.”
A Morir [To Die]
This is the voice of our conscience, telling us of the righteousness of God. And since conscience is the perfect interpreter of life, what it tells us is no question, no riddle, no problem, but a fact — the deepest, innermost, surest fact of life: God is righteous. Our only question is what attitude toward the fact we ought to take.
We shall hardly approach the fact with our critical reason. The reason sees the small and the larger but not the large. It sees the preliminary, but not the final, the derived but not the original, the complex but not the simple. It sees what is human but not what is divine.
We shall hardly be taught this fact by men.
"The Righteousness of God" (1916) in The Word of God and the Word of Man (1928) as translated by Douglas Horton; this passage begins with a quote of Isaiah 40:3-5; often quoted alone has been the phrase following it: "Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life."
"Crossing" describing memories of New Mexico in Hound and Horn (June 1928)
“We will all go down together—that's what makes us who we are.”
Source: Drenai series, The King Beyond the Gate, Ch. 24
Context: Come back and stand with us, lad. We will all go down together— that's what makes us who we are.
Anarchism & American Traditions (1908)
The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method
Context: If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.
“First we look at the hills in the painting,
Then we look at the painting in the hills.”
As quoted in Lin Yutang's My Country and My People (1935), pp. 99 and 248
Compare:
We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we've passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted,—better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out.
Robert Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi" (1855)
No. 9, st. 7.
Last Poems http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8lspm10.txt (1922)