They tell us sometimes that if we had only kept quiet, all these desirable things would have come about of themselves. I am remind...ed of the Greek clown who, having seen an archer bring down a flying bird, remarked, sagely: "You might have saved your arrow, for the bird would anyway have been killed by the fall."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An aspiring genius was D. Green: The son of a farmer, age fourteen;... His body was long and lank and lean-- Just right for flying, as will be seen;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A few days ago, while seated snugly in an airplane seat on my way back to New York from Chicago,... it occurred to me that a rathe...r striking similarity existed between the situation I found myself in then, flying in a modern airplane, and what I've often felt as I watch television. To begin with, both experiences are largely passive, or at any rate they have been transformed into passive experiences. But this shared passivity is itself more complicated than it seems, for though it produces in both cases an obvious condition of quiet and inactivity, it also demands from the passenger or viewer a very definite emotional commitment. One might call it a commitment to specifically nonaggressive and uninvolved behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is to be done with people who can't read a Sunday paper without messing it all up?... Show me a Sunday paper which has been l...eft in a condition fit only for kite flying, and I will show you an antisocial and dangerous character who has left it that way.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This, my first [bicycle] had an intrinsic beauty. And it opened for me an era of all but flying, which roads emptily crossing the ...airy, gold-gorsy Common enhanced. Nothing since has equalled that birdlike freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet; Haste you, sad notes, fall at her flying feet.... There, wrapped in cloud of sorrow, pity move, And tell the ravisher of my soul I perish for her love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of futur...e generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People having speech defects sometimes learn part of the practice by laborious study, but good speech is always mainly unconscious... speech. Any tennis player, even if he could not explain this enigma, could provide an analogy for it. When he sees a rapidly flying tennis ball coming toward him, he knows what he must do. He must maneuver himself into the proper position, be poised with his weight properly distributed, meet the ball with the proper sweep of his arm and with his racket held at just the right pitch, and all this must be timed to stop the flying ball at a precise point. But if the tennis player pauses to think of all these actions and how he will perform them, he is lost. The ball will not skim back over the net, building air pressure as it goes until it buzzes down into the opponent's corner. If the tennis player thinks about anything except where he wants the ball to go and what he plans for the next stroke, he will probably become so awkward that he will be lucky to hit the ball at all. Rapid, precise muscular actions can be successfully carried out only by the unconscious part of the brain. And so with the speaker. He cannot speak well unless he speaks unconsciously, for his movements are as precise, as complicated, and as exactly timed as those of the tennis player.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits--like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing b...eautiful women, flying thought the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits--involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding--inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is for ever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitablility of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »