Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aimi...ng at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own bo...dy. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, urges must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice, was so perfectly well turned and well placed, that, without being interes...ted in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse; a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter can not well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The frequency of personal questions grows in direct proportion to your increasing girth. . . . No one would ask a man such a perso...nally invasive question as "Is your wife having natural childbirth or is she planning to be knocked out?" But someone might ask that of you. No matter how much you wish for privacy, your pregnancy is a public event to which everyone feels invited.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dr. Scofield's equipment, which you have just seen, radiated waves direct to Professor Houghland's laboratory. When these waves ca...me in contact with those the professor's equipment was radiating, they created the interstellar frequency, which is the death ray.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is with a rush of home-sickness that the thought of death presents itself.... Such sentiment is the eternal stock of all religi...ons, modified indeed by changes of time and place, but indestructible, because its root is so deep in the earth of man's nature. The breath of religious initiators passes over them; a few "rise up with wings as eagles" [Isaiah 40:31], but the broad level of religious life is not permanently changed. Religious progress, like all purely spiritual progress, is confined to a few.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Architecture is a chained and fettered art. Far from being "frozen music," it is an art constantly attempting to realize in solid,... stable form those effects which music is able to conjure up in an instant--effects which succeed each other rapidly during the progress of a musical work. Music can attain the colossal in a way which, in architecture, only the rarest opportunities render even remotely possible. Music can, in a few moments, admit us through vast portals into avenues, courts and halls of infinite extent and variety. Music can suddenly raise up an entire structure and, by the device of modulation, lift it on to a podium, abruptly recess its facades and turn them bodily into the sunshine. Music can etch silhouettes ten times more intricate than those of Dresden or London City, repeat them, increase or reduce them, hurl them into the distance or bring them before us in precise detail. Most of the essentials of architecture--mass, rhythm, texture, outline--are within music's power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving, the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »