generations

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

There are not in the world at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and understand Plato:-never enough to pay for an edition of his works; yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of those few persons, as if God brought them written in his hand.

The constructive intellect [genius] produces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with nature.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

The moon of Mahomet Arose, and it shall set; While, blazoned as on heaven's immortal noon, The cross leads generations on.

My generation, faced as it grew with a choice between religious belief and existential despair, chose marijuana. Now we are in our Cabernet stage.

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.

It is the custom to sneer at the modern apartment-house, television, big-city Christmas, with its commercial taint . . . office parties, artificial . . . Christmas trees . . . but future generations in search of their lost Christmases may well remember its innocence; yes, and its beauty, too.

In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth.

It is something to make two blades of grass grow where only one was growing, it is much more to have been the occasion of the planting of an oak which shall defy twenty scores of winters, or of an elm which shall canopy with its green cloud of foliage half as many generations of mortal immortalities.