Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . .... I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author...--detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of indepen...dence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mothercountry. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For you, o broker, there is no other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of charac...ter, the aspiration of man, these are sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment of moneys.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual stron...g, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat: the body would feast. The soul says, The man and the woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is not prayer also a study of truth,--a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning... something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into creation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our experience, and fall. The wind shal...l blow them none knows whither.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »