Sacred Bones

Famous quotes containing the words sacred and/or bones:

    I never drank of Aganippe well,
    Nor ever did in shade of Tempe sit,
    And muses scorn with vulgar brains to dwell;
    Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit.
    Some do I hear of poets’ fury tell,
    But, God wot, wot not what they mean by it;
    And this I swear by blackest brook of hell,
    I am no pickpurse of another’s wit.
    Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

    The civilized nations—Greece, Rome, England—have been sustained by the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)