Is it true or false that Belfast is north of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That Beethoven was a drunkard? T...hat Wellington won the battle of Waterloo? There are various degrees and dimensions of success in making statements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely, in different ways on different occasions for different intents and purposes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon... Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might say, for example, that a patient has a kind of St Vitus's dance; a kind of dropsy; a kind of nerve fever; a kind of ague.... One would never say, however (to end once and for all the confusion of these names) "He has St. Vitus's dance," "He has nerve fever," "He has dropsy," "He has ague," since there simply are not any fixed, unchanging diseases to be known by such names.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gladstone in Great Britain and Parnell in Ireland, under the watchword, "Home Rule for Ireland," are fighting the battle of self-g...overnment for all mankind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: "England expects that every man will be a hero." It said: "England ...expects that every man will do his duty." In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have just read your dispatch about sore tongued and fatiegued [sic] horses. Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of you...r army have done since the battle of Antietem that fatigue anything?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christians are to be taught that the pope would and should wish to give of his own money, even though he had to sell the basilica ...of St. Peter, to many of those from whom certain hawkers of indulgences cajole money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood, and for these deeds of horror and destruction ...men have been rewarded with monuments, with great songs and epics. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness. Time alone will reveal what reward will be allotted to women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two destitute lives. Two sickly bachelors, chaste though without vows, deprived of all daily affection, suffering all the torments... of poetic passion, but for the Idea--adventurers of the mind only. Two existences virtually devoid of external vicissitudes. For one, the breaking-off of an engagement, the final attack against the Church, and death at forty-two. For the other, still less: a few years' professorship, a long wandering solitude, madness at forty-four. Each produced in some fifteen years his difficult, seminal work, and attracted only in extremis, by scandal, the attention of a few contemporaries. This external nakedness, contrasting with so much inner pathos, renders these lives exemplary; two pure tensions. In them the action of the mythic powers perfectly reveals its slow movements of approach, of alternating emergence and eclipse. These two chaste men meditated much on love, on women, and on marriage. Nietzsche has certainly written less on these subjects than Kierkegaard, but his work is no less rich in brief, often brazenly contradictory judgments on these three themes. It is remarkable that Nietzsche's contradictions afford a faithful epitome of Kierkegaard's, which in their turn repeat those of St. Paul himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »