Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, li...ke the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and that ...to compress it further can only make it more obscure?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war. Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the habit...s of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated; the compression and tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed t...o me the centre of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings ...about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological... paralysis, more than it is about winning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »