“An old man, going a lone highway,Came, at the evening, cold and gray,To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,Through which was flowing a sullen tide.The old man crossed in the twilight dim;The sullen stream had no fear for him;But he turned, when safe on the other side,And built a bridge to span the tide."Old man," said a fellow pilgrim, near,"You are wasting strength with building here;Your journey will end with the ending day;You never again will pass this way;You've crossed the chasm, deep and wide-Why build you this bridge at the evening tide?"The builder lifted his old gray head:"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,"There followeth after me today,A youth, whose feet must pass this way.This chasm, that has been naught to me,To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;Good friend, I am building this bridge for him.”

“Bridges are built not to cross over it but it is built to lift you to the other side safely.”

“For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of.”

“Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

“A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, and in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man's distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal under the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: 'This tower is most interesting.' But they also said (after pushing it over): 'What a muddle it is in!' And even the man's own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: 'He is such an odd fellow! Imagine using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? he had no sense of proportion.' But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.”

“The best man day in the world would involve building a bridge and then blowing up that bridge. Which is why you can't make a better man movie than The Bridge on the River Kwai, unless you make Two Bridges on the River Kwai.”