Nearby Bodie was a notoriously tough camp, where "a man for breakfast" was so frequent an occurrence that the phrase "bad man from... Bodie" was coined to describe those residents who were still in the land of the living. So impressive was its reputation for wickedness that once when an Aurora family considered moving to the town, the young daughter of the family finished her evening prayers with a tearful, "Goodbye, God, we're going to Bodie." Aurora ruffled whatever virtuous feathers it could muster and pointed scornfully. Bodie resentfully charged that the child has been deliberately misquoted--that what she had actually said was "Good! By God, we're going to Bodie"!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of "style." But while style--deriving from... the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets--suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The stuff of which tragedy and comedy are made is the same stuff. The foibles of mankind work up more easily into comedy than into... tragedy, and this is the chief difference between the two. We readily understand the Nemesis of temperament, the fatality of character, when it is exposed on a small scale. This is the business of comedy; and we do not here require the labored artifice of gods, mechanical plot, and pointed allegory to make us realize the moral. But in tragedy we have the large scale to deal with. A tragedy is always the same thing. It is a world of complicated and traditional stage devices for making us realize the helplessness of mankind before destiny. We are told from the start to expect the worst: there is going to be suffering, and the suffering is going to be logical, inevitable, necessary. There is also an implication to be conveyed that this suffering is somehow in accord with the moral constitution of the universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body. For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the sp...irit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion and science ... constitute deep-rooted and ancient efforts to find richer experience and deeper meaning than are found in... the ordinary biological and social satisfactions. As pointed out by Whitehead, religion and science have similar origins and are evolving toward similar goals. Both started from crude observations and fanciful concepts, meaningful only within a narrow range of conditions for the people who formulated them of their limited tribal experience. But progressively, continuously, and almost simultaneously, religious and scientific concepts are ridding themselves of their coarse and local components, reaching higher and higher levels of abstraction and purity. Both the myths of religion and the laws of science, it is now becoming apparent, are not so much descriptions of facts as symbolic expressions of cosmic truths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »