About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building. It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.
His descent was like nightfall.
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
Those who boast of their descent, brag on what they owe to others.
I am the father of a 9 year-old son whose descent into the world of autism began at the age of 7 months old after receiving numerous vaccinations in a single day; the same story that is told by thousands of other parents of children throughout the country whose healthy, normally developing children have become autistic after vaccinations.
The descent into Hades is much the same from whatever place we start.
Something is very, very wrong with American culture. The signs are everywhere. I think the country is in almost terminal descent.
If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built.
I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie.
Genealogy, n. An account of one's descent from a man who did not particularly care to trace his own.
Those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration; this belief must be important for group formation; furthermore it does not matter whether an objective blood relationship exists.
If the present generation, or any other, are disposed to be slaves, it does not lessen the right of the succeeding generation to be free: wrongs cannot have a legal descent.
So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect, and the title of Hellene a badge of education rather than of common descent.
The descent to Hades is the same from every place.
The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.
The descent into matter must be complete before the ascent to spirit can commence.
To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself. . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them.
