Bush life

“ Every dwarfed, stunted, gnarled bush, had the trunk, limbs, twigs, and gray, withered foliage, all in miniature, of some tree, hapless but sturdy, that has had a weatherbeaten struggle for life on a storm-threshed crag by the shore, or on a granite side of a mountain, with short allowance of soil to eat and water to drink. ”

“ A logging-bee followed the burning of the fallow, as a matter of course. In the bush, where hands are few, and labour commands an enormous rate of wages, these gatherings are considered indispensable, and much has been written in their praise; but to me, they present the most disgusting picture of a bush life. They are noisy, riotous, drunken meetings, often terminating in violent quarrels, sometimes even in bloodshed. Accidents of the most serious nature often occur, and very little work is done when we consider the number of hands employed, and the great consumption of food and liquor. ”

“ Often, for miles on a stretch, there is scarcely a tree or bush to relieve the blank monotony of these ugly, uncouth partitions of land, beyond charred stumps and rank weeds, and the uniform belt of forest at the back of the new fields. ”

“ Under these impressions men learn to delight in exploring the bush, and when they meet, as they often do, with sweet spots, on which Nature has secretly lavished her choicest gifts, most thoroughly do they enjoy, most devotedly do they admire, their beauty. In travelling some miles to the northward of Perth, a town on the Swan River, [Pg 19] Captain Grey fell in with a charming scene, which he thus describes: “Our” station, “this night, had a beauty about it, which would have made any one, possessed with the least enthusiasm, fall in love with a bush life. ”

“ A hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches to take care of herself ‘on her own.’
“A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to heat and cold, to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost incredible isolation.... For the children of the bush are, above all things, old, like the primitive forms of vegetation, the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are with their fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the cities, they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again quite leaves them ”

“ Truly rain is a marvellous transformer; not only vegetable but animal life is affected by it; the bush is enlivened by the twittering of small birds, which come from nobody knows where, build their nests, hatch out their young, and disappear! ”

“ Flowers--those precious gifts of God--do not delight in darkness and shade, and this is one great reason why they are so scarce in the woods. I saw more beautiful blossoms waving above the Niagara river, from every crevice in its rocky banks, than I over beheld during my long residence in the bush. These lovely children of light seem peculiarly to rejoice in their near vicinity to water, the open space allowed to the wide rivers affording them the air and sunshine denied to them in the close atmosphere of the dense woods. ”

“ But life in the bush has an original character of its own, and although books are scarcer there than in the towns, yet, in consequence of the bush people making no pretence to book learning, their want of it never struck me as a painful deficiency. ”

“ Every tree or bush in the neighbourhood is decorated with at least one pair of the beautiful, sociable birds; on every branch which affords an outlook sits a pair, and each mate takes a tender interest in all that concerns the other. In front of the nest-holes the bustle is like that about a bee-hive; some glide in, others glide out; some come, others go; many hover continually around the entrance to their brooding-places. Only when night draws on do they disappear into their holes ”

“ As Saddam's regime of fear is brought to an end, the people of Iraq are revealing the true hopes they have always held. It should surprise no one that Iraqis, like all people, resent oppression and welcome their own freedom. It should surprise no one that in every nation and every culture, the human heart desires the same good things: dignity, liberty, and a chance to build a better life.
As people throughout Iraq celebrate the arrival of freedom, America celebrates with them. We know that freedom is the gift of God to all mankind, and we rejoice when others can share it. ”

“ But the love is the life. If you would know what a man's life is, you have only to learn what his ruling love is, and you have an infallible clew to it. Now, as all true religion demands a good love, it must demand a good life of course, for the life is merely an exponent of the love. But the life which a man possesses here is the life, which he carries with him into the other world, and unless that life has been the native product of a pure and heavenly love here, it can by no means be a source of blessedness hereafter. ”

“ Where there is a unity of spirit, there is unity of all the good things of life. Perhaps I am not drawing from the bank of life's experience everything that I ought to have—because I have separated myself from the spiritual board of directors in this bank of life, and am not getting my dividends on time. My mental attitude is the cause; therefore, as I enter the Silence this time, I am going to maintain the faith and the love-spirit of my unity with all things. I maintain, therefore, my at-one-ment with God, with man and nature. I maintain that all of the original strength of spirit is mine. ”

“ Therefore, for your own good here today in success, prosperity and happiness as well as in health, peace and harmony, begin to pronounce over everything in life, All is Good. If you have any misunderstandings, All is Good. If you have any losses, All is Good, any reverses, All is Good, any sorrow, All is Good, any inharmony, All is Good. In everything at all that is out of perfection you must recognize only the good. ”

“ The dispensation of the New Jerusalem, whose character and genius we are now unfolding, has also the merit of making life its great distinguishing feature. Without at all disparaging the theoretical element of religion, it still gives a paramount place to the practical, and it does this too on such grounds—grounds laid in the very structure of our being—that no one who is at all conversant with the system can fail to see that the love-element is the nethermost stratum in the geology of our nature, and that from love flows charity, and from charity good works or neighborly uses. ”

“ Quieting the animal with some whispered words, he places himself behind a thick bush, and there stays all of a tremble, the only thing stedfast about him being his gaze, fixed upon the forms of the departing travellers. So carefully does he screen himself, that from the front nothing is visible to indicate the presence of anyone there, save the point of a spear, with dry blood upon the blade, projecting above the bushes, and just touching the fronds of a palm-tree, its ensanguined hue in vivid contrast with the green of the leaves, as guilt and death in the midst of innocence and life! ”

“ By far the greater number of bushes in the undergrowth are thickly covered with thorns, while the mimosas towering above them are armed with long, hard, sharp spines, and even the grasses have burr-like seed-capsules covered with fine prickles, or ears set with sharp hooks, so that every attempt to penetrate the forest from the path is foiled by a thousand obstacles. The bird the huntsman’s gun has brought down is lost to him because in falling it is caught in a bush which he cannot reach without an amount of exertion quite out of proportion to the object ”

“ Not everywhere, but here and there throughout the forest, and then always abundantly, there lives a little antelope, the bush or Salt’s antelope. It is one of the most charming of all ruminants, most gracefully built, not bigger than a fawn a few days old, and of a foxy, gray-blue colour. It lives with a mate in the thickest undergrowth of the forest, choosing for its lair or habitual resting-place a bush which is branched and leafy to the ground, and thence treading out narrow paths in all directions through the thicket. I have often shot the animal ”

“ From the necessary relation between the affectional and the intellectual principles of our nature, or the heart and the head, it makes faith entirely subordinate to love, and stamps as worthless a religion which does not distinguish itself by a life of charitable uses. It is in this that the essence of the religious character consists, and no salvo is found in a fancied provision made in the gospel for a dispensation from the stringent demands of the decalogue. Life, life, and not opinions or faith, is the grand criterion of admissibility to heaven. ”

“ Even in species widely remote there is great similarity of procedure, and the behaviour of the Buntings is typical of that of many. With the rise of the appropriate organic state the male resorts at daybreak to a suitable environment, occupies a58 definite position, and singling out some tree or prominent bush, which will serve as a headquarters, advertises its presence there by song. ”

“ We will assume that the nest is placed in the midst of a tangled bush. Well, the bird lays the first strands of the foundation and then goes in search of more material. The next time it approaches the nest from the opposite side of the bush, and presently it finds yet a third entrance. But each entrance is not made use of in turn: one is employed more frequently than the other two, and in the course of time becomes the sole highway to and from the nest. ”

“ The earth is indeed to be considered as having grown up through the life that is inherent in it. Man is the most concentrated and differentiated outgrowth of that life. Mankind is, so to speak, the brain of the earth, and is progressing towards the conscious guidance of all its processes. ”

“ I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes. You have seen duty and allegiance in the determined faces of our soldiers. You have seen that life is fragile, and evil is real, and courage triumphs. Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than yourself - and in your days you will add not just to the wealth of our country, but to its character. ”

“ And even if there were no life to come, his present life is happier far than that of the man who grabs at all the wealth he can get until he drops into the grave. The man who works "all for love and nothing for reward" is a being incomprehensible to us ordinary mortals; he is an angel, and if ever he was a candidate for a seat in Parliament he was not elected. Even love--"which rules the court, the camp, the grove"--is given only with the hope of a return of love; for hopeless love is nothing but hopeless misery.
I once hired an old convict as gardener at five shillings a day. ”

“ All human life is a gift from our Creator that is sacred, unique, and worthy of protection. On National Sanctity of Human Life Day, our country recognizes that each person, including every person waiting to be born, has a special place and purpose in this world. ”

“ At a workers' rally in a place called Branik on the outskirts of Prague the idea called America is alive. A worker, dressed in grimy overalls, rises to speak at the factory gates. And he begins his speech to his fellow citizens with these words, words of a distant revolution: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." ”

“ Mind is the re-electrifier and re-harmonizer of the octaves into all harmony.
Right thinking, therefore, is the most important thing in life. As a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Just as a tuning fork near a piano will respond with a vibration when a key of the same pitch is struck on the piano nearby, so likewise do the bodies of men respond to proper stimulus and become in tune. By right thinking man can re-harmonize himself, can achieve health, success and prosperity. ”

“ It is love that produces faith, and not faith that produces love; for faith pertains to the understanding, and the understanding is evermore secondary to the love, as light is to heat.
The paramount importance of a good life, therefore, as the essential element of a man's hope of eternal blessedness, is a necessary result of the constitution of our being, and there is nothing arbitrary about it. Nor is the doctrine liable to the charge of establishing human merit as the basis of salvation. ”

“ Americans saw death approach Ronald Reagan twice, in a moment of violence, and then in the years of departing light. He met both with courage and grace. In these trials, he showed how a man so enchanted by life can be at peace with life's end.
And where does that strength come from? Where is that courage learned? It is the faith of a boy who read the Bible with his mom. It is the faith of a man lying in an operating room, who prayed for the one who shot him before he prayed for himself. It is the faith of a man with a fearful illness, who waited on the Lord to call him home. ”

“ THOUGHT TO HOLD IN SILENCE AND TO MEDITATE UPON DURING THE DAY FOR JUSTICE "There's a Spirit of Justice that Secures me in Which is My Own."
If we reach a consciousness of justice, we need have no doubts as to our care in every particular while journeying between the two peaks of eternity—from birth to the Great Divide.
There is nothing that can defeat justice; and the person who has a consciousness of justice will attract to himself every conceivable thing needed for this life, because it will be the logical objective of justice to supply to each individual that justice for which he thinks. ”