Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really com...es: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There... they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite;... But black sin hath betrayed to endless night My world's both parts, and Oh! both parts must die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, ...which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You know how cunningly mankind is planned: We have one loving and one hating hand.... The loving's made to hold each other like, While with the hating other hand we strike.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, a...nd illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus you have an Indian availing himself cunningly of the advantages of civilization, without losing any of his woodcraft, but pro...ving himself the more successful hunter for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For hours, in fall days, I watched the ducks cunningly tack and veer and hold the middle of the pond, far from the sportsman;... b...ut what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »