I saw a moving sight the other morning before breakfast in a little hotel where I slept in the dusty fields. The young man of the house shot a little wolf called coyote in the early morning. The little heroic animal lay on the ground, with his big furry ears, and his clean white teeth, and his little cheerful body, but his little brave life was gone. It made me think how brave all living things are. Here little coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully - and losing it - just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely, too, or else we won't be worth as much as a little coyote.
William JamesRelated topics
animal anything body brave breakfast clean clothes early furry ground hero heroic house lay living losing man meal morning moving near nothing pay pick risking saw see shot sight sleep teeth way white wolf worth young things FieldsRelated quotes
For what advantage is it, that the world enjoys profound peace, if thou art at war with thyself? This then is the peace we should keep. If we have it, nothing from without will be able to harm us. And to this end the public peace contributes no little: whence it is said, ‘That we may lead a quiet and peaceable life.' But if any one is disturbed when there is quiet, he is a miserable creature. Seest thou that He speaks of this peace which I call the third (inner, ed.) kind? Therefore when he has said, ‘that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life,' he does not stop there, but adds ‘in all godliness and honesty.' But we cannot live in godliness and honesty, unless that peace be established. For when curious reasonings disturb our faith, what peace is there? or when spirits of uncleanness, what peace is there?
John Chrysostom
In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality - heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood-for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
Graham Greene
I have long known of Mr. Shaw, read his plays and prefaces, and loved him. I admire heroic effort. Accomplishment I love. What I am about to say is no invention, and I am putting it down for whatever it may be worth to the historian of literature and for the student of influences of men on men, and because it is true and must therefore be made known. As a boy, charging pell-mell through literature, reading everything I could lay hands on in the Public Library of Fresno, I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful - especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken - but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned.
William Saroyan
It is a special kind of secret how these Asiatic elements [of American Indians] came over the Bering Strait long ago. It's the same with the coyote. When I worked with the coyote [this quote refers to the performance by Beuys when he was locked up together with a coyote in a cage for a few days in René Block Gallery, New York City in 1974], I had the idea that it was not an indigenous animal. It came as a wolf with the Indians over the Bering Strait. And this Asiatic wolf, or step wolf, changed his whole biological configuration and behavior. Then it was my idea to import the coyote once more back to Europe, and you could see it [the coyote] change back to the European wolf or Siberian wolf. It is a transformed European wolf, the coyote, how it came to the character of a brush wolf.
Joseph Beuys
He is firm in constitution, as in resolution; industrious, indefatigable, determined and persevering; fixed in opinion, and unbiased in judgment; not over accessible, but studious to reward merit. He is a rock against which the waves of calumny and malice, moved by the gusts of passion natural to envy, have dashed; have washed its sides: he is still immovable on his base. He is in some degree susceptible of adulation, as is every man who has an honest thirst for military fame. He endures fatigue and hardship with fortitude uncommon for a man of his years. I have seen him, in the most severe night of the winter of 1794, sleep on the ground, like his fellow-soldiers, and walk around the camp at four in the morning, with the vigilance of a sentinel.
Anthony Wayne