... in the working class, the process of building a family, of making a living for it, of nurturing and maintaining the individual...s in it "costs worlds of pain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival c...an ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out.... Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him... who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it: because the reader follows the movement of his mind in the free flight of day-dreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When over Catholics the ocean rolls, They must wait several weeks before a mass... Takes off one peck of purgatorial coals, Because, till people know what's come to pass, They won't lay out their money on the dead-- It costs three francs for every mass that's said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness ...in the stomach, and other inconveniences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hour...s and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs--something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or th...e quality of his despair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is a series of diminishments. Each cessation of an activity either from choice or some other variety of infirmity is a death,... a putting to final rest. Each loss, of friend or precious enemy, can be equated with the closing off of a room containing blocks of nerves ... and soon after the closing off the nerves atrophy and that part of oneself, in essence, drops away. The self is lightened, is held on earth by a gram less of mass and will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »