Here also was made the novelty 'Chestnut Bell' which enjoyed unusual popularity during the gay nineties when every dandy jauntily ...wore one of the tiny bells on the lapel of his coat, and rang it whenever a story-teller offered a 'chestnut.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting m...ore novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the 'human essence,' the distinctive qualities of mind that ...are, so far as we know, unique to man and that are inseparable from any critical phase of human existence, personal or social. Hence the fascination of this study, and, no less, its frustration. The frustration arises from the coming to grips with the core problem of human language, which I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite number of expressions that are new to one's experience, that bear no simply physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able ... to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty.... The normal use of language is, in this sense, a creative activity. This creative aspect of normal language use is one fundamental factor that distinguishes human language from any known system of animal communication.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The core problem of human language ... I take to be this: having mastered a language, one is able to understand an indefinite numb...er of expressions that are new to one's experience, they bear no simple physical resemblance and are in no simple way analogous to the expressions that constitute one's linguistic experience; and one is able, with greater or less facility, to produce such expressions on an appropriate occasion, despite their novelty, and independently of detecting stimulus configurations, and to be understood by others who share this mysterious ability.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hour...s and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs--something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scenes must be beautiful, which, daily viewed, Please daily, and whose novelty survives... Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake,... in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The age of independent travel is drawing to an end," said E.M. Forster back in 1920, when it had been increasingly clear for deca...des that the mass production inevitable in the late industrial age had generated its own travel-spawn, tourism, which is to travel as plastic is to wood. If travel is mysterious, even miraculous, and often lonely and frightening, tourism is commonsensical, utilitarian, safe, and social, "that gregarious passion," the traveler Patrick Leigh Fermor calls it, "which destroys the object of its love." Not self-directed but externally enticed, as a tourist you go not where your own curiosity beckons but where the industry decrees you shall go. Tourism soothes, shielding you from the shocks of novelty and menace, confirming your prior view of the world rather than shaking it up. It obliges you not just to behold conventional things but to behold them in the approved conventional way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Music at its best is not in need of novelty; indeed, the older it is, the more one is accustomed to it, the stronger its effect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »