Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.Ingersoll, Robert Green
Religion
Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I: Including His Answers to the Clergy, His Oration at His Brother's Grave, Etc., Etc.
Ingersoll, Robert Green
Free thought
or time can not be holy any more than a vacuum can be pious. Not a
bit, not a bit; and no day can be so holy but what the laugh of a child
will make it holier still.
Strike with hand of fire, on, weird musician, thy harp, strung with
Apollo's golden hair! Fill the vast cathedral aisles with symphonies
sweet and dim, deft toucher of the organ's keys; blow, bugler, blow
until thy silver notes do touch and kiss the moonlit waves, and charm
the lovers wandering 'mid the vine-clad hills. But know your sweetest
strains are discords all compared with childhood's happy laugh--the
laugh that fills the eyes with light and every heart with joy! O,
rippling river of laughter, thou art the blessed boundary line between
the beasts and men, and every wayward wave of thine doth drown some
fretful fiend of care. O Laughter, rose lipped daughter of joy, there
are dimples enough in thy cheeks to catch and hold and glorify all the
tears of grief.
Don't plant your children in long, straight rows like posts. Let them
have light and air and let them grow beautiful as palms. When I was a
little boy children went to bed when they were not sleepy, and always
got up when they were. I would like to see that changed, but they say
we are too poor, some of us, to do it. Well, all right. It is as easy
to wake a child with a kiss as with a blow; with kindness as with
curse. And, another thing; let the children eat what they want to. Let
them commence at whichever end of the dinner they desire. That is my
doctrine. They know what they want much better than you do. Nature is
a great deal smarter than you ever were.
All the advance that has been made in the science of medicine, has been
made by the recklessness of patients. I can recollect when they
wouldn't give a man water in a fever--not a drop. Now and then some
fellow would get so thirsty he would say "Well, I'll die any way, so
I'll drink it," and thereupon he would drink a gallon of water, and
thereupon he would burst into a generous perspiration, and get
well--and the next morning when the doctor would come to see him they
would tell him about the man drinking the water, and he would say:
"How much?"
"Well, he swallowed two pitchers full."
"Is he alive?"
"Yes."
So they would go into the room and the doctor would feel his pulse and
ask him:
"Did you drink two pitchers of water?"
"Yes."
"My God! what a constitution you have got."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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