We New Yorkers see more death and violence than most soldiers do, grow a thick chitin on our backs, grimace like a rat and learn t...o do a disappearing act. Long ago we outgrew the need to be blowhards about our masculinity; we leave that to the Alaskans and Texans, who have more time for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are a sort of men whose visages Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,... And do a willful stillness entertain, With purpose to be dressed in an opinion Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit, As who should say, "I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Custom has made dancing sometimes necessary for a young man; therefore mind it while you learn it, that you may learn to do it wel...l, and not be ridiculous, though in a ridiculous act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scholars and thinkers are prone to an effeminate habit, and shrink if a coarser shout comes up from the street, or a brutal act is... recorded in the journals. The Medical College piles up in its museum its grim monsters of morbid anatomy, and there are melancholy skeptics with a taste for carrion who batten on the hideous facts in history,--persecutions, inquisitions, St. Bartholomew, massacres, devilish lives, Nero, Caesar Borgia, Marat, Lopez; men in whom every ray of humanity was extinguished, patricides, matricides and whatever moral monsters. These are not cheerful facts, but they do not disturb a healthy mind; they require of us a patience as robust as the energy that attacks us, and an unresting exploration of final causes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Were all the worshippers of the gold calf to memorialize me and request a restoration of the deposits I would cut my right hand fr...om my body before I would do such an act. The gold calf may be worshipped by others but as for myself I serve the Lord.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The very fact that you don't look or act or feel like the grandparents of even a generation ago does not mean that you are less, b...ut that you are more--in effect, an evolved form of grandparents, primed to do a bigger and more challenging job than any group before you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protes...t against extermination do so by a biological act.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you w...ill do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You can write anything you want to,--a six-act blank verse, symbolic tragedy or a vulgar short, short story. Just so that you writ...e it with honesty and gusto, and do not try to make somebody believe that you are smarter than you are. What's the use? You can never be smarter than you are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »