I can't quite define my aversion to asking questions of strangers. From snatches of family battles which I have heard drifting up ...from railway stations and street corners, I gather that there are a great many men who share my dislike for it, as well as an equal number of women who ... believe it to be the solution to most of this world's problems.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by... the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, lif...e consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, pa...rtly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature, hating art and pains, Baulks and baffles plotting brains;... Casualty and Surprise Are the apples of her eyes; But she dearly loves the poor, And, by marvel of her own, Strikes the loud pretender down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our books are false by being fragmentary: their sentences are bon mots, and not parts of natural discourse; childish expressions o...f surprise or pleasure in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to their petulance, or aversion from the order of nature,--being some curiosity or oddity, designedly not in harmony with nature, and purposely framed to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing their means.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he pr...ivately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have the greatest aversion to being a candidate on a ticket with a man whose record as an upright public man is to be in questio...n--to be defended from the beginning to the end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason, in a strict sense, as meaning the judgment of truth and falsehood, can never, of itself, be any motive to the will, and ca...n have no influence but so far as it touches some passion or affection. Abstract relations of ideas are the object of curiosity, not of volition. And matters of fact, where they are neither good nor evil, where they neither excite desire nor aversion, are totally indifferent, and whether known or unknown, whether mistaken or rightly apprehended, cannot be regarded as any motive to action.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »