In any country where talent and virtue produce no advancement, money will be the national god. Its inhabitants will either have to... possess money or make others believe that they do. Wealth will be the highest virtue, poverty the greatest vice. Those who have money will display it in every imaginable way. If their ostentation does not exceed their fortune, all will be well. But if their ostentation does exceed their fortune they will ruin themselves. In such a country, the greatest fortunes will vanish in the twinkling of an eye. Those who don't have money will ruin themselves with vain efforts to conceal their poverty. That is one kind of affluence: the outward sign of wealth for a small number, the mask of poverty for the majority, and a source of corruption for all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated witho...ut end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Alexander Woollcott broadcasts the story of the wife who returned a dog to the Seeing Eye with this note attached: "I am sending t...he dog back. My husband used to depend on me. Now he is independent, and I never know where he is."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mediocrity is the most effective mask a superior spirit can wear, because to the great majority, which is to say, to the mediocre,... it will not suggest a disguise:--and yet it is precisely for their sake that he puts it on--so as not to arouse them, and, indeed, not infrequently to avoid this out of pity and benevolence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask, on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy, .../>it was a mask; when I wrote of the god, fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song, it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself. ... No more masks! No more mythologies!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a child stays needy until he is fifty oh mother-eye, oh mother-eye, crush me in... the parent is as strong as a telephone pole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »