/lit/ - Literature

>>14386697
maybe, but to this? i started tearing up reading it again.
>we speak of art as distinguished from nature; but art itself is natural to man. he is in some measure the artificer of his own frame, as well as his fortune, and is destined, from the first age of his being, to invent and contrive. he applies the same talents to a variety of purposes, and acts nearly the same part in very different scenes. he would be always improving on his subject, and he carries this intention wherever he moves, through the streets of the populous city, or the wilds of the forest. while he appears equally fitted to every condition, he is upon this account unable to settle in any. at once obstinate and fickle, he complains of innovations, and is never sated with novelty. he is perpetually busied in reformations, and is continually wedded to his errors. if he dwell in a cave, he would improve it into a cottage; if he has already built, he would still build to a greater extent. but he does not propose to make rapid and hasty transitions; his steps are progressive and slow; and his force, like the power of a spring, silently presses on every resistance; and effect is sometimes produced before the cause it perceived; and with all his talent for projects, his work is often accomplished before his plan is devised. it appears, perhaps, equally difficult to retard or to quicken his pace; if the projector complain he is tardy, the moralist thinks him unstable; and whether his motions be rapid or slow, the scenes of a human affairs perpetually change in his management: his emblem is a passing stream, not a stagnating pool. We may desire to direct his love of improvement to its proper object, we may wish for stability of conduct; but we mistake human nature, if we wish for a termination of labour, or a scene of repose. […] if we are asked therefore, where the state of nature is to be found? we may answer: it is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of great britain, at the cape of good hope, or the straits of magellan. […] man may mistake the objects of his pursuit; he may misapply his industry, and misplace his improvements. if under a sense of such possible errors, he would find a standard by which to judge of his own proceedings, and arrive at the best state of his nature, he cannot find it perhaps in the practice of any individual, or of any nation whatever; not even in the sense of the majority or the prevailing opinion of his kind. he must look for it in the best conceptions of his understanding, in the best movements of his heart; he must hence discover what is the perfection and the happiness of which he is capable. he will find, on the scrutiny, that the proper state of his nature, taken in this sense, is not a condition from which mankind are forever removed, but on to which they may now attain; not prior to the exercise of their faculties, but procured by their just application.

>it's true
:(

I KNOW THAT. I KNOW THAT YOU IDIOT. JUST LET ME PRETEND TO BE ON THE INTERNET, GOD DAMN IT. JUST LET ME PRETEND.