Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned t...he natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favourite love stories in prose and verse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as a...n illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime--and a cruelty, too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Today the average inhabitant of the western hemisphere knows a little of everything. He has the newspaper on his breakfast table a...nd wireless within reach. For the evening there is the film, cards, or a meeting to complete a day spent in the office or factory where nothing that is essential has been learnt. With slight variation this picture of a low cultural average holds good over the entire range from factory-hand of clerk to manager or director. Only the personal will to culture, in whatever field and however pursued raises modern man above this level.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most works of literature have a beginning, middle, and an end. Most works of pornography do not. A typical piece of pornographic f...iction will usually have some kind of crude excuse for a beginning, but having once begun, it goes on and on and ends nowhere. This impulse or compulsion to repeat, to repeat endlessly, is one of pornography's most striking qualities. A pornographic work of fiction characteristically develops by unremitting repetition and minute mechanical variation--the words that may describe the process are again, again, again, and more, more, more. We also observed that although pornography is obsessed with the idea of pleasure, of infinite pleasure, the idea of gratification, of an end to pleasure (pleasure being here an endless experience of retentiveness, without release) cannot develop. If form in art consists in the arousal in the reader of certain expectations and the fulfillment of those expectations, then in this context too pornography is resistant to form and opposed to art. For fulfillment implies completion, gratification, an end; and it is as an end, a conclusion of any kind, that pornography most resists. The ideal pornographic novel, I should repeat, would go on forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we awoke, we found a heavy dew on our blankets. I lay awake very early, and listened to the clear, shrill ah, te te, te te, t...e of the white-throated sparrow, repeated at short intervals, without the least variation, for half an hour, as if it could not enough express its happiness. Whether my companions heard it or not, I know not, but it was a kind of matins to me, and the event of the forenoon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of literature--take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,--is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few o...riginal tales,--all the rest being variation of these.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Valery ... said that prose was walking, poetry dancing. Indeed, the original two terms, prosus and versus meant, respectively, "go...ing straight forth" and "returning," and that distinction does point up the tendency of poetry to incremental repetition, variation, and the treatment of different themes in a single form. Robert Frost said shrewdly that poetry was what got left behind in translation, which suggests a criterion of almost scientific refinement: when in doubt, translate; whatever is left over is poetry, whatever gets through is prose. And yet even to so cagy a definition the great exception is a resounding one: some of the greatest poetry we have is the Authorized Version of the Bible, which is not only a translation but also, as to its appearance in print, identifiable neither with verse nor with prose in English but rather with cadence compounded of both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a sense, every tool is a machine--the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is betw...een one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If one believes philosophers, then what we call religion is only a deliberately popularized or an instinctively artless philosophy.... Poets seem to consider religion rather as a variation of poetry which by misjudging its proper beautiful game takes itself too seriously and one-sidedly. Philosophy, however, admits and recognizes that it can begin and complete itself only with religion. Poetry seeks only to strive for the infinite and despises worldly utility and culture, which are the true antitheses of religion. Eternal peace among artists is thus not far away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »