I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victo...ry than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and ...among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice.... My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man... can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is "sensitive;" or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture--in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of wh...at is good or bad art in the theater.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good aphorism is too hard for the teeth of time and is not eaten up by all the centuries, even though it serves as food for ever...y age: hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which--like salt--is always prized, but which never loses its savor as salt does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever could properly characterize Goethe's Meister would have actually expressed what is the timely trend in literature. He woul...d be able, as far as literary criticism is concerned, to rest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious exp...ression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man's family.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you learned the alphabet of heaven and can count three? Do you know the number of God's family? Can you put mysteries into wo...rds? Do you presume to fable of the ineffable? Pray, what geographer are you, that speak of heaven's topography? Whose friend are you, that speak of God's personality?... Yet we have a sort of family history of our God,--so have the Tahitians of theirs,--and some old poet's grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine everlasting truth, and God's own word. Pythagoras says, truly enough, "A true assertion respecting God is an assertion of God"; but we may well doubt if there is any example of this in literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »