“Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”
January 5, 1856
Journals (1838-1859)
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Henry David Thoreau 385
1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitio… 1817–1862Related quotes
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)
The Analects, The Doctrine of the Mean
Context: It is only he who is possessed of the most complete sincerity that can exist under heaven, who can give its full development to his nature. Able to give its full development to his own nature, he can do the same to the nature of other men. Able to give its full development to the nature of other men, he can give their full development to the natures of animals and things. Able to give their full development to the natures of creatures and things, he can assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth. Able to assist the transforming and nourishing powers of Heaven and Earth, he may with Heaven and Earth form a ternion.
Hays translation
All that is from the gods is full of Providence.
II, 3
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book II
Source: 2000s, A Personal Odyssey (2000), Ch. 5 : Halls of Ivy
Context: In the summer of 1959, as in the summer of 1957, I worked as a clerk-typist in the headquarters of the U. S. Public Health Service in Washington. The people I worked for were very nice and I grew to like them. One day, a man had a heart attack at around 5 PM, on the sidewalk outside the Public Health Service. He was taken inside to the nurse's room, where he was asked if he was a government employee. If he were, he would have been eligible to be taken to a medical facility there. Unfortunately, he was not, so a phone call was made to a local hospital to send an ambulance. By the time this ambulance made its way through miles of Washington rush-hour traffic, the man was dead. He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors. Nothing so dramatized for me the nature of a bureaucracy and its emphasis on procedures, rather than results.
“Give lilies with full hands.”
Manibus date lilia plenis.
Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book VI, Line 883
Quote in Gainsborough's letter, 14 Sept. 1767, to his friend William Jackson of Exeter; as cited in The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, ed. Mary Woodall, 1961
1755 - 1769
