The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outv...alues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than volumes of chemistry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Supposing the Mechanical Phase to have lasted 300 years, from 1600 to 1900, the next or Electric Phase would have a life equal to ...(the square root of 300), or about seventeen years and a half, when--that is, in 1917Mit would pass into another or Ethereal Phase, which, for half a century, science has been promising, and which would last only (the square root of 17.5), or about four years, and bring Thought to the limit of its possibilities in the year 1921. It may well be!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give f...orth its spark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The general feeling was, and for a long time remained, that one had several children in order to keep just a few. As late as the s...eventeenth century . . . people could not allow themselves to become too attached to something that was regarded as a probable loss. This is the reason for certain remarks which shock our present-day sensibility, such as Montaigne's observation, "I have lost two or three children in their infancy, not without regret, but without great sorrow."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: th...is is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »