I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerable ...concessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is... recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew, massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Caesar Borgia, Marat, Lopez; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, patricides, matricides and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We, the lineal representatives of the successful enactors of one scene of slaughter after another, must, whatever more pacific vir...tues we may also possess, still carry about with us, ready at any moment to burst into flame, the smoldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass. Armenian refugees, Jewish refugees, refugees from Fra...nco Spain. But a political leader or artistic figure is an exile. Thomas Mann yesterday, Theodorakis today. Exile is the noble and dignified term, while a refugee is more hapless.... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all--... not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. A...nyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man can only attain knowledge with the help of those who possess it. This must be understood from the very beginning. One must l...earn from him who knows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »