It means eating your words, this thing of refusing to be a fence-sitter, but I'd rather eat my words than get calluses from sittin...g. No one who has not experienced the condescension of a buyer toward an ordinary salesgirl can have any conception of its withering effect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they ...sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In order to prove a friend to one's guests, frugality must reign in one's meals; and, according to an ancient saying, one must eat... to live, not live to eat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custo...dy and bring them back to their right senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause--I wish I could name every one--but with such women consecrating... their lives, failure is impossible!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
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 »
When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the... pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »