Best 3 quotes of Adeline Knapp on MyQuotes

I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness.

Once upon a time man conceived the belief that this universe, with its many worlds swinging through space, was created for him. He fancied that the sun shone by day to warm and vivify him; that the stars of night were none other than lamps to his feet; that the other animals existed to afford him food and clothing—and sport; that the very flowers of the field blossomed and fruited and were beautiful for his gratification. In fact, man conceived the belief that instead of being the wise brother and helper of this creation amidst which he moves, he was the great central pivot upon which all revolves. A sorry lesson, surely, for man to read into the broad, open page of Nature’s great book. Small wonder that to him in his meanness its message came as “the painful riddle of the earth.” But it was the best he could do: the best any of us can do until we have learned the great lesson of the ancient Wise One has written out for us—which she will teach us, in time, through death, if we will not let her teach it through life: the lesson that use is not appropriation; that appropriation sets use to groan and sweat under fardels of evil.

There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts. Dante never imagined a terror like this.