As a particularly dramatic gesture, he throws wide his arms and whacks the side of the barn with the heavy cane he uses to stab at... contesting bidders. With more vehemence than grammatical elegance, he calls upon the great god Caveat Emptor to witness with what niggardly stinginess these flinty sons of Scotland make cautious offers for what is beyond any question the finest animal ever beheld.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long; even if it is, th...e consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is one principal and as it were radical distinction between different minds, in respect of philosophy and the sciences; whic...h is this: that some minds are stronger and apter to mark the differences of things, others to mark their resemblances. The steady and acute mind can fix its contemplations and dwell and fasten on the subtlest distinctions: the lofty and discursive mind recognises and puts together the finest and most general resemblances. Both kinds however easily err in excess, by catching the one at gradations, the other at shadows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our art is the finest, the noblest, the most suggestive, for it is the synthesis of all the arts. Sculpture, painting, literature,... elocution, architecture, and music are its natural tools. But while it needs all of those artistic manifestations in order to be its whole self, it asks of its priest or priestess one indispensable virtue: "faith."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The novelist's--any writer's--object is to whittle down his meaning to the exactest and finest possible point. What, of course, is... fatal is when he does not know what he does mean: he has no point to sharpen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Real good breeding, as the people have it here, is one of the finest things now going in the world. The careful avoidance of all d...iscussion, the swift hopping from topic to topic, does not agree with me; but the graceful style they do it with is beyond that of minuets!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude... toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech--it is a gift from heart to heart.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Renaissance was, as much as anything, a revolt from the logic of the Middle Ages. We speak of the Renaissance as the birth of ...rationalism; it was in many ways the birth of irrationalism. It is true that the medieval Schoolmen, who had produced the finest logic that the world has ever seen, had in later years produced more logic than the world can ever be expected to stand. They had loaded and lumbered up the world with libraries of mere logic; and some effort was bound to be made to free it from such endless chains of deduction. Therefore, there was in the Renaissance a wild touch of revolt, not against religion but against reason.... When all is said, there is something a little sinister in the number of mad people in Shakespeare. We say that he uses his fools to brighten the dark background of tragedy; I think he sometimes uses them to darken it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a t...housand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »