Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have... read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Normal children of both sexes and all cultures will follow a more or less standard and universal developmental pattern and timetab...le, and reach approximately the same level of development at maturity. While a particular culture's need and expectations and teaching will shape the course of development and affect adult capabilities to some degree, normal individuals, whatever their native culture, if transplanted and taught, could learn to meet the normal demands of their adapted cultures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How much time, approximately, can a worker in a hectic, speeded-up world give to his work and be a sane, all-round, informed, and ...recreated citizen? Unless he lives near his work, due allowance must be made for going and coming. Eight hours for sleep and eight hours for family and social life, education, recreation, and other activities which include, in the case of many women workers, keeping house and clothes in order and taking care of a family, and in the case of all workers, occasional visits to dentists and doctors, paying gas bills and the thousand and one other things an increasingly complicated life thrusts upon even the humblest, seem minimal for the "mechanics of living."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The motive of the drama of human life is the necessity, laid upon every man who comes into the world, of discovering the mean betw...een self-assertion and self-restraint suited to his character and his circumstances. And the eternally tragic aspect of the drama lies in this: that the problem set before us is one the elements of which can be but imperfectly known, and of which even an approximately right solution rarely presents itself, until that stern critic, aged experience, has been furnished with ample justification for venting his sarcastic humor upon the irreparable blunders we have already made.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For everything outside the phenomenal world, language can only be used allusively, but never even approximately in a comparative w...ay, since, corresponding as it does to the phenomenal world, it is concerned only with property and its relations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A two-week-old infant cries an average of one and a half hours every day. This increases to approximately three hours per day when... the child is about six weeks old. By the time children are twelve weeks old, their daily crying has decreased dramatically and averages less than one hour. This same basic pattern of crying is present among children from a wide range of cultures throughout the world. It appears to be wired into the nervous system of our species.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Approximately 80% of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation, so let's not go overboard in setting and en...forcing tough emission standards from man-made sources.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is reality? I am a plaster doll; I pose... with eyes that cut open without landfall or nightfall upon some shellacked and grinning person, eyes that open, blue, steel, and close. Am I approximately an I. Magnin transplant?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »