At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such ba...d taste that it defeats all categories and definitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the thro...ng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conc...eptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order...;Mpoetry = the best words in the best order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake--it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it. As long as these defin...itions remain intact--that is, as long as men are defined as sexual aggressors and women are defined as passive receptors lacking integrity--men who are exemplars of the norm will rape women.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our definitions, we grope after the spiritual by describing it as invisible. The true meaning of spiritual is real; that law wh...ich executes itself, which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not existing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most v...ulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds? There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Education at school continues what has been done at home: it crystallizes the optical illusion, consolidates it with book learning..., theoretically legitimizes the traditional trash and trains the children to know without understanding and to accept denominations for definitions. Astray in his conceptions, entangled in words, man loses the flair for truth, the taste for nature. What a powerful intellect must you possess, to be suspicious of this moral carbon dioxide and with your head swimming already, to hurl yourself out of it into the fresh air, with which, into the bargain, everyone round is trying to scare you!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With this new way of providing a foundation for mathematics, which we may appropriately call a proof theory, I pursue a significan...t goal, for I should like to eliminate once and for all the questions regarding the foundations of mathematics, in the form in which they are now posed, by turning every mathematical proposition into a formula that can be concretely exhibited and strictly derived, thus recasting mathematical definitions and inferences in such a way that they are unshakable and yet provide an adequate picture of the whole of science. I believe I can attain this goal completely with my proof theory.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Re...ason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »