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However, Aristotle himself was unable to extract this fact, that, in the form of commodity-values, all labour is expressed as equal human labour and therefore as labour of equal quality, by inspection from the form of value, because Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers.

With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labor, the useful character of the kinds of labor embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different concrete forms of labor. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labor, human labor in the abstract.

“You’re one of those people who fall off a tree and never quite reach the ground.”

On the whole, birds appear to be the most aesthetic of all animals, excepting of course man, and they have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.

“Books are boring.”
“Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside of you,” answered Julian.

“People talk too much. Humans aren’t descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”

Unless we wilfully close our eyes, we may, with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage; nor need we feel ashamed of it. The most humble organism is something much higher than the inorganic dust under our feet; and no one with an unbiased mind can study any living creature, however humble, without being struck with enthusiasm at its marvelous structure and properties.

“Latin, young man. There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”

“Latin, young man. There’s no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”

The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable. The letter ‘m’ in the word ‘am’, means ‘I’; so that in the expression ‘I am’, a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained.

How did you factor ghosts into any terroir? Did they deepen the flavor, or did they make things dry, chalky, irreconcilable?

The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.

A man must for years examine for himself great piles of superimposed strata, and watch the sea at work grinding down old rocks and making fresh sediment, before he can hope to comprehend anything of the lapse of time, the monuments of which we see around us.

I have no way of knowing whether you, who eventually will read this record, like stories or not. If you do not, no doubt you have turned these pages without attention. I confess that I love them. Indeed, it often seems to me that of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music...

Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

A staid, steadfast man, whose life for the most part was a telling pantomime of action, and not a tame chapter of words.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Queequeg was George Washington cannibalistically developed.

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

The Romans, on the contrary, remained satisfied with a dull, stupid subjectivity; consequently, the external was only an Object- something alien, something hidden.

We have said that in the Greek religion the thrill of awe suggested by Nature was fully developed to something Spiritual- to a free conception, a spiritual form of fancy- that the Greek Spirit did not remain in the condition of inward fear, but proceeded to make the relation borne to man by Nature, a relation of freedom and cheerfulness.

Napoleon, in a conversation which he once had with Goethe on the nature of Tragedy, expressed the opinion that its modern phase differed from the ancient, through our no longer recognizing a Destiny to which men are absolutely subject, and that Policy occupies the place of ancient Fate.

But Divine Wisdom, i.e., Reason, is one and the same in the great as in the little; and we must not imagine God to be too weak to exercise his wisdom on the grand scale.

Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known, because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but a complex man's idea of simplicity.

How happy is he born and taught,
That serveth not another's will?
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his utmost skill?
...
This man is freed from servile hands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall:
Lord of himself, though not if lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.
- Sir Henry Wotton.

And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous part.

All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.