Ladder Fires

Famous quotes containing the words ladder and/or fires:

    “O, when degree is shaked,
    Which is the ladder of all high designs,
    The enterprise is sick. How could communities,
    Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
    Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
    The primogeniture and due of birth,
    Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
    But by degree stand in authentic place?
    Take but degree away, untune that string,
    And hark what discord follows. Each thing meets
    In mere oppugnancy.”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    “When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me,—when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do as it were run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)