The Fashionable World is grown free and easie; our Manners sit more loose upon us: Nothing is so modish as an agreeable Negligence.... In a word, Good Breeding shows it self most, where to an ordinary Eye it appears the least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hill farmer ... always seems to make out somehow with his corn patch, his few vegetables, his rifle, and fishing rod. This sel...f-contained economy creates in the hillman a comparative disinterest in the world's affairs, along with a disdain of lowland ways. "I don't go to question the good Lord in his wisdom," runs the phrasing attributed to a typical mountaineer, "but I jest cain't see why He put valleys in between the hills."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of ...men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility--the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What's this, Aurora Leigh, You write so of the poets and not laugh?... Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark, Exaggerators of the sun and moon, And soothsayers in a tea-cup? I write so Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,-- The only speakers of essential truth, Opposed to relative, comparative, And temporal truths;... The only teachers who instruct mankind, From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is, to find, in everything, those certain bounds, quos ultra citrave nequit con...sistere rectum. These boundaries are marked out by a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover; it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In manners, this line is good breeding; beyond it, is troublesome ceremony; short of it, is unbecoming negligence and inattention. In morals, it divides ostentatious Puritanism from criminal relaxation; in religion, superstition from impiety; and, in short, every virtue from its kindred vice or weakness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of one thing I can assure you with comparative certainty, whoever wins, Europe will be economically ruined. This war is America's ...great opportunity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practice...s and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »