Away with the cant of "Measures, not men!"Mthe idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot al...ong. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing ...as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon. "I'll tell you what, sir," he said; "the talent of this child ...is not to be imagined. She must be seen, sir--seen--to be ever so faintly appreciated."... The infant phenomenon, though of short stature, had a comparatively aged countenance, and had moreover been precisely the same age--not perhaps to the full extent of the memory of the oldest inhabitant, but certainly for five good years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boredom is not an end-product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You've got to go by or past or through bore...dom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most young black females learn to be suspicious and critical of feminist thinking long before they have any clear understanding of... its theory and politics.... Without rigorously engaging feminist thought, they insist that racial separatism works best. This attitude is dangerous. It not only erases the reality of common female experience as a basis for academic study; it also constructs a framework in which differences cannot be examined comparatively.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The one thing that it seems impossible to escape from, once the habit is formed, is masturbation. It goes on and on, on into old a...ge, in spite of marriage or love affairs or anything else. And it always carries this secret feeling of futility and humiliation, futility and humiliation. And this is, perhaps, the deepest and most dangerous cancer of our civilization. Instead of being a comparatively pure and harmless vice, masturbation is certainly the most dangerous sexual vice that a society can be afflicted with, in the long run. Comparatively pure it may be--purity being what it is. But harmless!!!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A preschool child does not emerge from your toddler on a given date or birthday. He becomes a child when he ceases to be a wayward..., confusing, unpredictable and often balky person-in-the- making, and becomes a comparatively cooperative, eager-and-easy-to-please real human being--at least 60 per cent of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Micawber] is not only the greatest of Dickens' comic figures, but, with the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic f...igure in the whole range of English literature, a literature supremely rich in such characters. Falstaff is greater because he is himself a comic genius; in him the two familiar types of characters, the comic rogue and the comic butt, are combined, for he is a comic rogue who is his own butt, and as such he is unique. To this must be added his extraordinary versatility, the teeming abundance of his wit and humour, ranging from crude horse-play to a kind of comic philosophy, which is only displayed within a comparatively small compass ... but makes him tower over every other comic character. Micawber must be included in quite another category, namely, that of the great solemn fools, who do not offer us their wit and humour but only themselves, who do not make jokes but are themselves one endless joke. If Micawber--and all the persons of his kind (and most of us have known a few)Mshould realise even for a moment that he is funny, he would be ruined for us; but happily he does not, and while we are actually in his presence--and what a presence--we too must be as solemn as he is, the greatest of all the great solemn fools.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »