The deeply thoughtful and human consciousness of a Macbeth is not found in comedy. Comic action tends to be as Bergson described i...t, physical or purblind, instead of highly conscious. Similarly, the great comic actor specializes in the presentation of mental obtuseness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis. We call intuition here the sympathy by ...which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique and consequently inexpressible in it. Analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic poet will never think of grouping around the chief character in his play secondary characters to serve as simplified copi...es, so to speak, of the former. The hero of a tragedy represents an individuality unique of its kind. It may be possible to imitate him, but then we shall be passing, whether consciously or not, from the tragic to the comic. No one is like him, because he is like no one. But a remarkable instinct, on the contrary, impels the comic poet, once he has elaborated his central character, to cause other characters, displaying the same general traits, to revolve as satellites round him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has sta...mped with its own freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It goes without saying that religion thus conceived is the opposite of magic. The latter is essentially selfish, the former admits... of and often even demands disinterestedness. The one claims to force the compliance of nature, the other implores the favor of a god. Above all, magic works in an environment which is semi-physical and semi-moral--the magician, at all events is not dealing with a person; whereas on the contrary it is from the god's personality that religion draws its greatest efficacy. Granted that primitive intelligence thinks it perceives around it, in phenomena and in events, elements of personality rather than complete personalities, religion, as we have just understood it, will ultimately reinforce these elements to the extent of completely personifying them; whereas magic looks upon them as debased, dissolved, as it were, in a material world in which their efficacy can be tapped.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little ...while.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the swee...test music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise--although the philosophers generally call it "re...cognition"!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »