With the present wage conditions there are thousands of young women who are living in a state of semi-starvation and they are alwa...ys surrounded by the most terrible temptation. Oh, I know that some of [the] greatest reformers insist that a girl's virtue is not affected by under-nourishment, disease and nervous collapse; but if these well housed, well fed, well dressed people were put in a dirty, ugly room, if their clothes did not protect them from the cold, if their stomachs were never filled, would not even the staunchest lose some of her self-respect when looking forward to an old age? It is only a matter of wonder to me that so many girls keep clean and decent through it all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human race is yet in its infancy--no, not infancy; infancy is innocent and sweet--it is in its ugly boyhood, half way between ...the child and the man--in a state of semi-barbarism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It goes without saying that religion thus conceived is the opposite of magic. The latter is essentially selfish, the former admits... of and often even demands disinterestedness. The one claims to force the compliance of nature, the other implores the favor of a god. Above all, magic works in an environment which is semi-physical and semi-moral--the magician, at all events is not dealing with a person; whereas on the contrary it is from the god's personality that religion draws its greatest efficacy. Granted that primitive intelligence thinks it perceives around it, in phenomena and in events, elements of personality rather than complete personalities, religion, as we have just understood it, will ultimately reinforce these elements to the extent of completely personifying them; whereas magic looks upon them as debased, dissolved, as it were, in a material world in which their efficacy can be tapped.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They can never have known old monks, wise, shrewd, unerring in judgment, and yet aglow with passionate insight, so very tender in ...their humanity. What miracle enables these semi-lunatics, these prisoners of their own dreams, these sleepwalkers, apparently to enter more deeply each day into the pain of others? An odd sort of dream, an unusual opiate which, far from turning him back into himself and isolating him from his fellows, unites the individual with mankind in the spirit of universal charity!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: pers...ons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although I've risen! and my back is bold. My tongue is brainy, choosing from among... Care, rage, surprise, despair, and choosing care. I'm semi-splendid within what I've defended.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She fights with semi-folded arms, Her strong bag, and the stiff... Frost of her face (that challenges "When" and "If.") And altogether she does Rather Well.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give me the keys. I feel for the common chord again, Sliding by semi-tones till I sink to a minor,--yes,... And I blunt it into a ninth, and I stand on alien ground, Surveying a while the heights I rolled from into the deep; Which, hark, I have dared and done, for my resting-place is found, The C Major of this life: so, now I will try to sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or ...bad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »