No stream rises higher than its source. What ever man might build could never express or reflect more than he was. He could record neither more nor less than he had learned of life when the buildings were built.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.
No one rises so high as he who knows not whither he is going.
At a certain stage in his evolution, man himself had been able to lay hold upon a higher order of things, which raised him above the level of the beasts that perish, and enabled him to see, at least in the distance, the shining towers of the City of God.
The sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.
Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.
The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it.
I think, then, that man, after having satisfied his first longing for facts, wanted something fuller - some grouping, some adaptation to his capacity and experience, of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in.
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.
When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him... For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth.