The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stan...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Feste. Beshrew me, the knight's in admirable fooling. Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Ay, he does well enough if he be disposed, and so... do I, too. He does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If death, said my father, reasoning with himself, is nothing but the separation of the soul from the body;--and if it is true that... people can walk about and do their business without brains,--then certes the soul does not inhabit there. Q.E.D.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; bu...t practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman shall not wear a man's apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the... LORD your God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more... than for hidden treasures; who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »