I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my ...nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim ... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consid...eration these twenty years at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He holds the wire from this box of nerves Praising the moral error... Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves, And the hunger's emperor; He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I never drink wine ... I keep my hands soft and supple ... I sleep in a soft bed and never over-tire my body. It is because whe...n my hour strikes I must be a perfect instrument. My eyes must be steady, my brain clear, my nerves calm, my aim true. I must be prepared to do my work, successfully if God wills. But if I perish, I perish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are two kinds of timidity--timidity of mind, and timidity of the nerves; physical timidity, and moral timidity. Each is inde...pendent of the other. The body may be frightened and quake while the mind remains calm and bold, and vice versë. This is the key to many eccentricities of conduct. When both kinds meet in the same man he will be good for nothing all his life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... this I conceive to be no time to prate of moral influences. Our men's nerves require their accustomed narcotics and a glass of... whiskey is a powerful friend in a sunstroke, and these poor fellows fall senseless on their heavy drills.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is at the same time by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendors found behind the t...omb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to one's eyes, these tears are not the sign of excessive pleasure, they are rather witness to an irritated melancholy, to a condition of nerves, to a nature exiled to imperfection and which would like to seize immediately, on this very earth, a revealed paradise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »