The distinction between the two types of art is a difference of density rather than of species. In the same number of bars of Beet...hoven and Sousa, there is, in Beethoven, more of the essence of music, giving a thicker, more intense effect likely to alienate the unfamiliar listener by "boring" him, just as the palate accustomed to that richer food is bored by the thinness of the popular tune. The feeling that this is not the only difference is due to the fact that as an art grows more and more complex and dense, the number of relations among simple elements increases until those relations look like extraordinarily refined experiences denied to the common herd. Yet there is no real barrier to be leaped over by an effort of genius between understanding a "vulgar" dance tune and a Beethoven symphony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to lo...ok for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already unde...rstand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The dramatic art would appear to be rather a feminine art; it contains in itself all the artifices which belong to the province of... woman: the desire to please, facility to express emotions and hide defects, and the faculty of assimilation which is the real essence of woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a reportorial quality in Hemingway's work that is absent from Fitzgerald's fiction. Hemingway's technique--in his early w...ork, at least--was to let the observed detail convey emotion with no authorial analysis. Fitzgerald was more concerned with evoking and analyzing the feeling of an experience than with recording detail. As he advised his daughter, "But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you--and then you will understand how it is possible to make even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier's!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science has a simple faith, which transcends utility. Nearly all men of science, all men of learning for that matter, and men of s...imple ways too, have it in some form and in some degree. It is the faith that it is the privilege of man to learn to understand, and that this is his mission. If we abandon that mission under stress we shall abandon it forever, for stress will not cease. Knowledge for the sake of understanding, not merely to prevail, that is the essence of our being. None can define its limits, or set its ultimate boundaries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of the physicality of the most famous blonde in the world is a wholesome eroticism blurred a little round the edges by... the fact she is not quite sure what eroticism is. This gives her her tentative luminosity and what makes her, somehow, always more like her own image in the mirror than she is like herself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taft represented a victory for everything that was least progressive in Roosevelt. The great love which bound the two men, as it h...as been described touchingly and at length by dozens of their friends and aides, contained scarcely a glimmer of common interest relating to reform. It had to do with social standing, political advancement, favors asked and favors given.... The essence of Roosevelt's conservatism was his dependence on party politics; of Taft's his adherence to the law. Roosevelt, that is to say, was a politician; his friend was a lawyer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essence of acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals wi...th the perfecting of that medium.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »