The sense of an entailed disadvantage--the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast,... and easily turns a self-centred, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The plant is not a mere product of the soil, but a living process centred in itself, the essence of which has nothing to do with t...he character of the soil. In the same way the art-work must be regarded as a creative formation, freely making use of every precondition. Its meaning and its own individual particularity rests in itself, and not in its preconditions. In fact one might also describe it as a being that uses man and his personal dispositions merely as a cultural medium or soil, disposing his powers according to his own laws, while shaping itself to the fulfillment of its own creative purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both in principle and in their private attitude toward mankind Johnson and Rousseau were irreconcilable opponents. Johnson had a v...oracious appetite for life, and was passionately concerned with the welfare of individual men and women; while Rousseau, although he was persuaded that he loved the human race, or would have loved it if he could, followed a solitary, self-centred course and, among a host of associates, protectors, disciples, made comparatively few friends whose opinions and support he valued. Here one remembers another literary dispute, held some hundred-and-fifty years later, when Henry James, writing to the youthful H.G. Wells, described their fundamental difference. "You," he explained, "don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!" Johnson, too, despite his capacity for deep affection, was a life-long pessimist; Rousseau, the suspicious and resentful exile, was an inveterate reformer, and launched the doctrine of "human perfectibility" that made so strong, and often so confusing, an appeal to English nineteenth-century Romantic poets. He was a teacher; but his chief aim was primarily to teach himself; if he desired to learn, he confessed, it was primarily in order to understand his own character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Piece by piece I seem to re-enter the world: I first began... a small, fixed dot, still see that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack pushed into the scene, a hard little head protruding from the pointillist's buzz and bloom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »