Life direct...is what Flaubert and Joyce have convinced themselves the man may never get quite clear of but the artist has nothing... to do with. What they can't admit is that t is overrated: which artists, faking and fumbling it together out of spit and toothpicks, should know best of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Building up a family's fortune is like moving earth with a needle, but losing a family's fortune can be as swift as a boat rushing... downstream with the current.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine-forest. The English mind disliked the French mind... because it was antagonistic, unreasonable, perhaps hostile, but recognized it as at least a thought. The American mind was not a thought at all; it was a convention, superficial, narrow, and ignorant; a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp and direct. The English themselves hardly conceived that their mind was either economical, sharp or direct; but the defect that most struck an American was its enormous waste in eccentricity. Americans needed and used their whole energy, and applied it with close economy; but English society was eccentric by law and for sake of the eccentricity itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimon...y to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
At the utmost, the active-minded young man should ask of his teacher only mastery of his tools. The young man himself, the subject... of education, is a certain form of energy; the object to be gained is economy of his force; the training is partly the clearing away of obstacles, partly the direct application of effort. Once acquired, the tools and models may be thrown away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the t...est of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit... or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not ... the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in th...e memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman's adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the cons...titution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »