Word: idea
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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DEAR - : I really should have written to you before, if I had had any idea that you cared to hear from me. I am grieved to learn that you are having such a "glorious" time. The pursuit of happiness in this world is so fatally sure to end in bitter disappointment, that any transient glimpse of it which we may obtain only serves to make the final catastrophe less bearable. The great object in life - or rather of existence, for even our few moments of reasoning existence hardly deserve the name of life - I take to be somewhat as follows...
...advisability of literary contests, steps were taken to inaugurate them. Harvard, in common with many other colleges, considering the final and all important question to be the purpose rather than the practicability of these contests, naturally refused to send delegates to a convention designed to carry out an idea that the callers of the convention refused to discuss. One of New England's ablest writers had already stated the more salient advantages of such contests, and had failed to convince any large body of our students. We do not pretend to judge the motives - they were probably of a mixed...
...objects of our associations, and suggesting some remedies. That I may not seem to pretend to greater ability and ingenuity than I possess, let me declare at once that the conception of what I am about to present was not wholly original with me. Great men suggested the idea, and great moralists have done much to encourage it. De Quincy has written an essay on "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts." "The Prayse of Ignorance" was one of Tom Hood's "Whims...
...very foundation of a right understanding of the author's meaning. Usually, the only complaint is that too much time is spent on the details of grammar, and it is admitted that philology, history, and geography are sometimes both interesting in themselves and helpful in discovering the author's ideas and opinions. Again and again words occur whose sense can only be fully shown by going through the successive steps by which they arrived at that sense; if you avoid such discussions, do you not leave an obscurity in your knowledge of the book you are reading? The charge that...
...spent on it, would give more general satisfaction, than a large lamp and reflector placed outside the south door of Memorial Hall. Now, on stormy evenings, every one of five hundred men must shuffle doubtfully down the steps in the darkness, or leap boldly into the night with little idea where he will land. Ice and snow would render the descent, short as it is, uncomfortably precarious. The use of merely proposing such an improvement is, we know, questioned, but few men are generous enough to take the matter into their own hands, and it can only be hoped that...