Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, whereas humor has a kindly eye and a comfortable girth. Wit, if it be necessary,... uses malice to score a point--like a cat it is quick to jump--but humor keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments of the day, but humor is concerned with homely eternal things. Wit wears silk, but humor in homely-spun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. Wit is sharper company at the table, but humor serves better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively answer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of h...imself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself fe...lt above that of the model.... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have proceeded ... to prevent the lapse from ... the point of blending between wakefulness and sleep.... Not ... that I can rend...er the point more than a point--but that I can startle myself ... into wakefulness--and thus transfer the point ... into the realm of Memory--convey its impressions,... to a situation where ... I can survey them with the eye of analysis.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that i...s sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course.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 »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.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 »