Parisians are so besotted, so silly and so naturally inept that a street player, a seller of indulgences, a mule with its cymbals,... a fiddler in the middle of a crossroads, will draw more people than would a good Evangelist preacher.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Look you, Doubloon, your zodiac here is the life of man in one round chapter.... To begin: there's Aries, or the Ram--lecherous do...g, he begets us; then, Taurus, or the Bull--he bumps us the first thing; then Gemini, or the Twins--that is, Virtue and Vice; we try to reach Virtue, when lo! comes Cancer the Crab, and drags us back; and here, going from Virtue, Leo, a roaring Lion, lies in the path--he gives a few fierce bites and surly dabs with his paw; we escape, and hail Virgo, the virgin! that's our first love; we marry and think to be happy for aye, when pop comes Libra, or the Scales--happiness weighed and found wanting; and while we are very sad about that, Lord! how we suddenly jump, as Scorpio, or the Scorpion, stings us in rear; we are curing the wound, when whang come the arrows all round; Sagittarius, or the Archer, is amusing himself. As we pluck out the shafts, stand aside! here's the battering-ram, Capricornus, or the Goat; full tilt, he comes rushing, and headlong we are tossed; when Aquarius, or the Waterbearer, pours out his whole deluge and drowns us; and, to wind up, with Pisces, or the Fishes, we sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was easy to recognize in him the anti-social animus of a born evangelist, but there was also something else--a kind of voluptuo...us delight in the shabby and preposterous, a perverted aestheticism like that of a latter-day movie or radio fan, a wild will to roll in and snuffle balderdash as a cat rolls in and snuffles catnip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Kipling, the grandson of a Methodist preacher, reveals the tin-pot evangelist with increasing clarity as youth and its ribaldries ...pass away and he falls back upon his fundamentals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Americanistic pitch, of course, was old hat on the Bible circuit, as were subterranean virility fears common, the latter alway...s animating the former in the extra-defensive and recurrent dream of the evangelist in which he sees himself, in full color and cinemascope, a lantern-jawed begrenaded U.S. Marine leaping out of a trench to beat the living shit out of the Devil who, widespread was the assumption, wore perfume, spoke Russian, and carried a purse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You don't decide to build a church because you have money in the bank. You build because God says this is what I should do. Faith ...is the supplier of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I started out by believing God for a newer car than the one I was driving. I started out believing God for a nicer apartment than ...I had. Then I moved up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is against Stupidity in every shape and form that we have to wage our eternal battle. But how can we wonder at the want of sens...e on the part of those who have had no advantages, when we see such plentiful absence of that commodity on the part of those who have had all the advantages?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue ...is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognised that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self- government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »