An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confr...onted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, London is a man's town, there's power in the air; And Paris is a woman's town, with flowers in her hair;... And it's sweet to dream in Venice, and it's great to study Rome; But when it comes to living, there is no place like home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-...bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men hear gladly of the power of blood or race. Every body likes to know that his advantages cannot be attributed to air, soil, sea..., or to local wealth, as mines and quarries, nor to laws and traditions, nor to fortune, but to superior brain, as it makes the praise more personal to him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosities: no cow-painter, no bird-...fancier, no mannerist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the great he tells greatly; the small, subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do the one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love-songs; a merit so incessant, that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes ...us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had some short struggle in my mind whether I should resign my lover or my liberty, but this lasted not long. I found myself as f...ree as air and could not bear the thought of putting myself in any man's power for life only from a present capricious inclination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conscience ... lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure being. It lives in drea...d of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being.... Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called 'beautiful soul,' its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies With beauty, which is varying every hour;... But, in chaste hearts uninfluenced by the power Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower, That breathes on earth the air of paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lift not thy spear against the Muses' bower: The great Emathian conqueror bid spare... The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground; and the repeated air Of sad Electra's poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »