Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous. If men would steadily observe realities only, and... not allow themselves to be deluded, life ... would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Musick is certainly a very agreeable Entertainment, but if it would take the entire Possession of our Ears, if it would make us in...capable of hearing Sense, if it would exclude Arts that have a much greater Tendency to the Refinement of human Nature; I must confess I would allow it no better Quarter than Plato has done, who banishes it out of his Common-wealth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Moscow, breathing fire like a human volcano with its smouldering lava of passion, ambition and politics, its hurly- burly of meeti...ngs and entertainment.... Moscow seethes and bubbles and gasps for air. It's always thirsting for something new, the newest events, the latest sensation. Everyone wants to be the first to know. It's the rhythm of life today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is because everything is relative That we shall never see in that sphere of pure wisdom and... Entertainment much more than groping shadows of an incomplete Former existence so close it burns like the mouth that Closes down over all your effort like the moment Of deathLESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape... into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony--this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A mind at liberty to reflect on its own observations, if it produce nothing useful to the world, seldom fails of entertainment to ...itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profi...t, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the works of the better poets you get the sensation that they're not talking to people any more, or to some seraphical creature.... What they're doing is simply talking back to the language itself--as beauty, sensuality, wisdom, irony--those aspects of language of which the poet is a clear mirror. Poetry is not an art or a branch of art, it's something more. If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological, indeed genetic, goal. Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a "read," commits an anthropological crime, in the first place, against himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »