Our discussion will be adequate; if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought fo...r alike in all discussions, and more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation.... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises, to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that b...uys their books.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The artist's personality must be left in his dressing-room; his soul must be denuded of its own sensations and clothed with the ba...se or noble qualities he is called upon to exhibit.... [he] must leave behind him the cares and vexations of life, throw aside his personality for several hours, and move in the dream of another life, forgetting everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on a...ny excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era,--then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could wish there were a treaty made between the French and the English theatres, in which both parties should make considerable ...concessions. The English ought to give up their notorious violations of the unities, and all their massacres, racks, dead bodies, and mangled carcasses, which they so frequently exhibit upon their stage. The French should engage to have more action, and less declamation, and not to cram and to crowd things together to almost a degree of impossibility from a too scrupulous adherence to the unities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit ...their tyranny.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...we avoid hospitals because ... they'll kill you there. They overtreat you. And when they see how old you are, and that you stil...l have a mind, they treat you like a curiosity: like "Exhibit A" and "Exhibit B." Like, "Hey. nurse, come on over here and looky-here at this old woman, she's in such good shape...." . Most of the time they don't even treat you like a person, just an object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet had a less sensitive grasp of language than the novelist and a less profound feeling for symbolism, so that his verse nar...ratives are not as poetic as James's greater prose fictions. Nevertheless the two writers exhibit interesting resemblances. Both rely on a gift for creating atmosphere. Both tend to shove the murders and adulteries offstage, and make the action the subject of extended discussion among the characters. Both are preoccupied with the theme, exemplified in the lives of so many New Englanders and at some period in their own, that worldly failure may issue in spiritual triumph.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A drop of water has the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of a flute; st...rength of a host, as well as of a hero.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aimi...ng at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »