Critics generally come to be critics not by reason of their fitness for this, but of their unfitness for anything else. Books shou...ld be tried by a judge and jury as though they were a crime, and counsel should be heard on both sides.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe it is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably supe...rior to his companion in some faculty. His want of skill in other directions, has added to his fitness for his own work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank confessions,--his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses,--until he ...finds that he is the complement of his hearers;Mthat they drink his words because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The requirements of the theatre are very great--a strong constitution, energy and unflagging purpose, charm of feature, these alon...e do not necessarily mean anything, and they must not be relied upon as assurances of an easy conquest of the public heart. It is not only a question of fitness for the work, but of long years of most diligent effort to master the technique of the theatre, and to develop whatever of the art instinct we may possess upon the simplest, broadest, and most human lines.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Clearly, society has a tremendous stake in insisting on a woman's natural fitness for the career of mother: the alternatives are a...ll too expensive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fit...ness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Making a logging-road in the Maine woods is called "swamping" it, and they who do the work are called "swampers." I now perceived ...the fitness of the term. This was the most perfectly swamped of all the roads I ever saw. Nature must have coƶperated with art here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but... if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »