Alas, we are the victims of advertisement. Those who taste the joys and sorrows of fame when they have passed forty, know how to l...ook after themselves. They know what is concealed beneath the flowers, and what the gossip, the calumnies, and the praise are worth. But as for those who win fame when they are twenty, they know nothing, and are caught up in the whirlpool.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the b...uffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,--these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,--and this would always be his.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many young people adopt pleasures for which they have not the least taste, only because they are called by that name.... You must ...allow that drunkenness, which is equally destructive to body and mind, is a fine pleasure. Gaming, that draws you into a thousand scraps, leaves you penniless, and gives you the air and manners of an outrageous madman, is another most exquisite pleasure, is it not? As to running after women, the consequences of that vice are only the loss of one's nose, the total destruction of health, and, not unfrequently, the being run through the body.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The farmer after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bankrupt, like the merchant. ...This result might well seem astounding. All this drudgery, from cockcrowing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mortgages and the auctioneer's flag, and removing from bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is the fool.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If after all this any one will be so sceptical, as to distrust his Senses, and to affirm, that all we see and hear, feel and taste..., think and do, during our whole Being, is but the series and deluding appearances of a long Dream, whereof there is no reality,... I must ask him to consider, if all be a Dream, then he doth but dream, that he makes the Question; and so it is not much matter, that a waking Man should answer him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of sm...ell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I see now that we store him up year after year, old suicides... and I know at the news of your death, a terrible taste for it, like salt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now; Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,... Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow, And do not drop in for an after-loss: Ah! do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow, Come in the rearward of a conquered woe; Give not a windy night a rainy morrow, To linger out a purposed overthrow. If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last, When other petty griefs have done their spite, But in the onset come; so shall I taste At first the very worst of fortune's might.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Shakespeare, who was considered the English Corneille, flourished at about the time of Lope de Vega. He had a strong and fertile g...enius, full of naturalness and sublimity, without the slightest spark of good taste or the least knowledge of the rules.... After two hundred years most of the outlandish and monstrous ideas of this author have acquired the right to be considered sublime, and almost all modern authors have copied him.... It does not occur to people that they should not copy him, and the lack of success of their copies simply makes people think that he is inimitable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »