Standing on the bare ground,--my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I be...come a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and particle of God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he i...s capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then is he caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The master propagandist, like the advertising expert, avoids obvious emotional appeals and strives for a tone that is consistent w...ith the prosaic quality of modern life--a dry, bland matter-of-factness. Nor does the propagandist circulate "intentionally biased" information. He knows that partial truths serve as more effective instruments of deception than lies. Then he tries to impress the public with statistics of economic growth that ne glect to give the base year from which the growth is calculated, with accurate but meaningless facts about the standard of living--with raw and uninterpreted data, in other words, from which the audience is invited to draw the inescapable conclusion that things are getting better and the present regime therefore deserves the people's confidence.... By using accurate details to imply a misleading picture of the whole, the artful propagandist, it has been said, makes truth the principal form of falsehood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books, gentlemen, are a species of men, and introduced to them you circulate in the "very best society" that this world can furnis...h, without the intolerable infliction of "dressing" to go into it. In your shabbiest coat and cosiest slippers you may socially chat even with the fastidious Earl of Chesterfield, and lounging under a tree enjoy the divinest intimacy with my late lord of Verulam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all institutions where the brisk air of public criticism fails to circulate (as, for example, in scholarly bodies and senates),... an innocent corruption grows up, like a mushroom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Anyone having that dual familiarity with prewar small towns and modern shopping malls will ... be repelled by the comparison. A pr...eoccupation with physical facades coupled with a lack of sociological insight is common among the mall's many fans.... Totally unlike Main Street, the shopping mall is populated by strangers. As people circulate about in the constant, monotonous flow of mall pedestrian traffic, their eyes do not cast about for familiar faces, for the chance of seeing one is small. That is not part of what one expects there. The reason is simple. The mall is centrally located to serve the multitudes from a number of outlying developments within its region. There is little acquaintance between these developments and not much more within them. Most of them lack focal points or core settings and, as a result, people are not widely known to one another, even in their own neighborhoods, and their neighborhood is only a minority portion of the mall's clientele.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like the effects of industrial pollution ... the AIDS crisis is evidence of a world in which nothing important is regional, local,... limited; in which everything that can circulate does, and every problem is, or is destined to become, worldwide.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a... kind of blood must circulate forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We occasionally rested in the shade of a maple or a willow, and drew forth a melon for our refreshment, while we contemplated at o...ur leisure the lapse of the river and of human life; and as that current, with its floating twigs and leaves, so did all things pass in review before us, while far away in cities and marts on this very stream, the old routine was proceeding still. There is, indeed, a tide in the affairs of men, as the poet says, and yet as things flow they circulate, and the ebb always balances the flow. All streams are but tributary to the ocean, which itself does not stream, and the shores are unchanged, but in longer periods than man can measure. Go where we will, we discover infinite change in particulars only, not in generals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Humor does not wear well. It is commonly enough said, that a joke will not bear repeating. The deepest humor will not keep. Humors... do not circulate, but stagnate, or circulate partially. In the oldest literature, in the Hebrew, the Hindoo, the Persian, the Chinese, it is rarely humor, even the most divine, which still survives, but the most sober and private, painful or joyous thoughts, maxims of duty, to which the life of all men may be referred. After time has sifted the literature of a people, there is left only their SCRIPTURE, for that is WRITING, par excellence. This is as true of the poets, as of the philosophers and moralists by profession; for what subsides in any of these is the moral only, to reappear as dry land at some remote epoch.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »