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 »
We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined... perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.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 »
One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual.... There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »