I hope that the examples I have given have gone some way towards demonstrating that pedestrian touring in the later 1780s and the 1790s was not a matter of a few 'isolated affairs', but was a practice of rapidly growing popularity among the professio...
She [the Virgin Mary] was normal. She had already had other children. The Bible tells us that Jesus had two brothers. Virginity, as it relates to Jesus, is based on a different thing: Mary initiated a new generation of grace. A new era began. She is ...
Odysseus inclines his head. "True. But fame is a strange thing. Some men gain glory after they die, while others fade. What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another." He spread his broad hands. "We cannot say who will survive the holocaust...
...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we are wrong. Our task in the present...is to live as res...
There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, singled, and female in New York. It's a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It's about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong ...
Often people request prayers for deliverance, inner healing, or physical healing. But more frequently they simply want a man or woman to whom they can turn--not because of what this person is able to do but because of what he or she is: a person who ...
I'm sick of the ignorance that lack of funding has generated, of the fathers who apporach me at dinner parties with their four-year-old girls clasped to their pant legs and say, "Yeah, but studies say kids can buy drugs more easily than they can buy ...
To attempt to describe how music pervades and flavors a life feels a little like an invasion of privacy, even if the privacy is my own. Listening to music,...is finally the most inward of acts--so inward that even language, even the language of thoug...
At best he read popular science magazines like the Scientific American he had now, to keep himself up-to-date, in layman's terms, with physics generally. But even then his concentration was marred, for a lifetime's habit made him inconveniently watch...
God comes right out and tells us why he gives us more money than we need. It's not so we can find more ways to spend it. It's not so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children. It's not so we can insulate ourselves from needing God's provision. ...
Tragische Schuld verkörpert sich im permanenten Konflikt zwischen der uralten religiösen Vorstellung von der Missetat als einer Beschmutzung, die einer ganzen Rasse anhaftet und unausweichlich von einer Generation auf die nächste vererbt wird [......
You can't wish for more wishes or for vague generalities like happiness that are impossible to grant. Your wish has to be something specific enough that I can use my wand to make it happen. Oh, and recently there's been a ban on inserting yourself in...
It seems almost oxymoronic to believe that this new idealism has led to a new pessimism about marriage, but that is exactly what has happened. In generations past there was far less talk about "compatibility" and finding the ideal soul mate. Today we...
The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi...
Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this succes...
Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in th...
Here’s the thing: You can be materialistic and poor. You can also be content and rich. It has nothing to do with your income and it has everything to do with your heart. You don’t need to earn more money in order to be generous with your money. S...
And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in genera...
I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I am generous to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my suppr...
... on these expanded membranes [butterfly wings] Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings gener...
To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen, is to do pretty well; and professing myself moreover convinced, that the General's unjust interference, so far from being really injurious to their felicity, was perhaps ra...
