I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the... very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding--joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Common sense always speaks too late. Common sense is the guy who tells you you ought to have had your brakes relined last week bef...ore you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always somebody else's money he's adding up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The learned professors have been at considerable pains in their attempts to make a distinction between tools and implements on the... one hand, and machinery on the other. Nor have they arrived much of anywhere. The one is continually shading into the other. Here is an ordinary shovel used by a day labourer in a ditch; here is the same shovel with a somewhat thicker handle, containing a pneumatic attachment which is said to improve its digging power; here is a very much larger shovel with curved ends and steel teeth, hitched to an arm that is hitched to a steam engine, which can gobble up a cartload of dirt at one mouthful. Where does the tool stop and the machine begin? A grindstone is widely held to be a primitive tool; a turret lathe is widely held to be a machine. Both spin around. What is the essential difference? The employment of nonhuman power, steam, oil, gas, has been defined as the difference. Well and good. Then everything worked by human hands and legs is a tool only, and bicycles, typewriters, adding machines, sewing machines, foot lathes, clocks, hand-pumps--are not machines. Which is absurd. And what is one to do with treadmills for grinding corn, whose motive power is said by some to be the donkey, and by some the carrot in front of his nose?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lad...y in the Garden.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Exaggeration is in the course of things. Nature sends no creature, no man into the world, without adding a small excess of his pro...per quality. Given the planet, it is still necessary to add the impulse; so, to every creature nature added a little violence of direction in its proper path, a shove to put it on its way; in every instance, a slight generosity, a drop too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that the ...artist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A country whose buildings are of wood, can never increase in its improvements to any considerable degree.... Whereas when building...s are of durable materials, every new edifice is an actual and permanent acquisition to the state, adding to its value as well as to its ornament.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »