A prudent cuckold (and there are many such at Paris) pockets his horns, when he cannot gore with them; and will not add to the tri...umph of his maker, by only butting with them ineffectually.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For many people religion is a rigid concept, somewhat like a stone that is passed from generation to generation. We don't add to i...t, change it, or challenge it; we just pass it along. But even the most cursory study of the history of religions would undermine such a view. Religious traditions are far more like rivers than stones. Like the Ganges or the Gallatin, they are flowing or changing. Sometimes they dry up in arid land; sometimes they radically change course and move out to water new territory. All of us contribute to the river of our traditions. We do not know how we will change the river or be changed as we experience its currents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever will cultivate their own mind will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, bu...t as much daily solicitude in cherishing as exotic fruits and flowers; the vices and passions (which I am afraid are the natural product of the soil) demand perpetual weeding. Add to this the search after knowledge ... and the longest life is too short.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So this tangle of impossible resolutions and irresolutions: The desire to have fun, to make noise, and so to... Add to the already all-but-illegible scrub forest of graffiti on the shithouse wall. Someone is coming to get you: The mailman, or a butler enters with a letter on a tray Whose message is to change everything, but in the meantime ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now narrow minds can develop as well through persecution as through benevolence; they can assure themselves of their power by tyra...nnizing cruelly or beneficently over others; they go the way their nature guides them. Add to this the guidance of interest, and you will have the key to most social riddles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that cri...tical opinion is often orphaned in the present.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A "modern" man has nothing to add to modernism, if only because he has nothing to oppose it with. The well-adapted drop off the de...ad limb of time like lice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the so...ldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I care not for the theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic of your moral code, I care not for the hoary respectability and trad...itional mysticisms of your theological institutions, I care not for the beauty and solemnity of your rituals and religious ceremonies, I care not even for the reasonableness and unimpeachable fairness of your social ethics,--if it does not turn out better, nobler, truer, men and women,--if it does not add to the world's stock of valuable souls,--if it does not give us a sounder, healthier, more reliable product from this great factory of men--I will have none of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Next-door a baker's apprentice with his wife, an employee in a printing-shop, she has inflammation of the ovaries. Wonder what tho...se two get out of life? Well, first of all, they get each other, then last Sunday a vaudeville and a film, then this or that club meeting and a visit to his parents. Nothing else? Well now, don't drop dead, sir. Add to that nice weather, bad weather, country picnics, standing in front of the stove, eating breakfast and so on. And what more do you get, you, captain, general, jockey, whoever you are? Don't fool yourself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »