Famous quotes containing the words edward, gibbon, oxford, religious and/or journey:
“The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”
—W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt)
“My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel. They know the use of a tutor, as they know the use of a horse; and they draw the greatest amount of benefit from both. The reading men are kept by hard walking, hard riding, and measured eating and drinking, at the top of their condition, and two days before the examination, do not work but lounge, ride, or run, to be fresh on the college doomsday.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“... the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)