Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors? Free to exploit the vast realm of the simple ...and the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis..., and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outv...alues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and ac...tivity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
L.A. is the ultimate anonymous city: except when you choose not to be, you are generally alone. New Yorkers are never alone. It's ...surprising that street crime happens here at all, since muggings and rapes require solitude for the proper intimacy between criminal and victim, and in New York you have to go looking for a genuinely deserted block of street. Furthermore, whereas at night it can get dark in some parts of L.A., New Yorkers are never without light, at least the artificial kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is essentially a People's contest. On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and su...bstance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders--to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all--to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded ...by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust--oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick--and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humani...ty, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sinclair Lewis is the perfect example of the false sense of time of the newspaper world.... [ellipsis in source] He was always dom...inated by an artificial time when he wrote Main Street.... He did not create actual human beings at any time. That is what makes it newspaper. Sinclair Lewis is the typical newspaperman and everything he says is newspaper. The difference between a thinker and a newspaperman is that a thinker enters right into things, a newspaperman is superficial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A true politeness does not result from any hasty and artificial polishing, it is true, but grows naturally in characters of the ri...ght grain and quality, through a long fronting of men and events, and rubbing on good and bad fortune.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »