How ignorant we are! How ignorant everyone is! We can cut across only a small area of the appallingly expanding fields of knowledg...e. No human being can know more than a tiny fraction of the whole. It must have been satisfactory in ancient times when one's own land seemed to be the universe; when research studies, pamphlets, books did not issue in endless flow; when laboratories and scientists were not so rapidly pushing back frontiers of knowledge that the process of unlearning the old left you gasping for breath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the "American Way of Life" is a fossil of history. What do they care... if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiffassed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frug, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragassing across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, ...every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Impressionists dissolved forms. They painted blurry "impressions" of objects modified by changing light and atmospheric condit...ions--drifts of fog, shimmering forest shadows, the glow of gas lamps on rainy streets. Cubists cracked the mirror of art. In their paintings objects open into surrounding space and none has an uninterrupted outline. Parts are broken off, colors bleed into neighboring objects, and translucent facets of space with multiple light sources cut shadows across bounding surfaces. They removed sections of faces and reassembled what remained to create grotesque open forms in defiance of natural appearance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.... You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Quite different from them [abstractions of animal nature] in origin and intent, but confused with them in form, are those other co...mpanions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-spun dream of simple people, and like them in the uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no story; he is but a presence; the spiritual form of Arcadia, and the ways of human life there; the reflexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and orchards, and wild honey; the dangers of its hunters; its weariness in noonday heat; its children, agile as the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle him, in the unfamiliar upper places; its one adornment and solace being the dance to the homely shepherd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the brook Molpeia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut and dri...ed,--very dry, I assure you, to hear, dry enough to burn, dry-rotted and powder-post, methinks,--which they set up between you and them in the shortest intercourse; an ancient and tottering frame with all its boards blown off. They do not walk without their bed. Some, to me, seemingly very unimportant and unsubstantial things and relations are for them everlastingly settled,--as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and the like. These are like the everlasting hills to them. But in all my wanderings I never came across the least vestige of authority for these things. They have not left so distinct a trace as the delicate flower of a remote geological period on the coal in my grate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There were many vessels, like gulls, skimming over the surface of the sea, now half concealed in its troughs, their dolphin- strik...ers plowing the water, now tossed on the top of the billows.... Some of these vessels lagged behind, while others steadily went ahead. We narrowly watched their rig and the cut of their jibs, and how they walked the water, for there was all the difference between them that there is between living creatures. But we wondered that they should be remembering Boston and New York and Liverpool, steering for them, out there; as if the sailor might forget his peddling business on such a grand highway. They had perchance brought oranges from the Western Isles; and were they carrying back the peel? We might as well transport our old traps across the ocean of eternity. Is that but another "trading flood," with its blessed isles? Is Heaven such a harbor as the Liverpool docks?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »