Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kep...t ignorant. This ideology is compounded from different sources: items that have survived from religion, items of empirical knowledge, items of protective scepticism, items culled for comfort from the superficial learning that is supplied. But the point is that common- sense can never teach itself, can never advance beyond its own limits, for as soon as the lack of fundamental learning has been made good, all items become questionable and the whole function of common-sense is destroyed. Common-sense can only exist as a category insofar as it can be distinguished from the spirit of enquiry, from philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the lang...uage he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader's eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Lucy's] Aunt Margaret [Boggs] and Miss Sharpe are here on their way to a Woman's Rights Convention in Dayton. My point on this su...bject is that the proper discharge of the function of maternity is inconsistent with the like discharge of the duties of (the political duties of) citizenship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The point is, that the function of the novel seems to be changing; it has become an outpost of journalism; we read novels for info...rmation about areas of life we don't know--Nigeria, South Africa, the American army, a coal-mining village, coteries in Chelsea, etc. We read to find out what is going on. One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel--the quality of philosophy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Once women invented farming, and began to keep and breed animals, they discovered the crucial function of the rooster and the henh...ouse. Fathers suddenly gained a function, and could do what only women had been able to do for all those millions of years--point at a child and say, "That is my son," "That is my daughter." Patriarchy quickly followed, beginning about five thousand years ago; a very short time in the development of our species, but covering all of recorded history.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 »
If one writes or reads novels from the point of view of psychology, it is very inconsistent and petty to want to shy away from eve...n the slowest and most detailed analysis of the most unnatural lusts, gruesome tortures, shocking infamy, and disgusting sensual or spiritual impotence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The function of comedy is to dispel ... unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis ...right on to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Symbols have one characteristic in common with signs; they point beyond themselves to something else. The red sign at the street c...orner points to the order to stop the movements of cars at certain intervals. A red light and the stopping of cars have essentially no relation to each other, but conventionally they are united as long as the convention lasts. The same is true of letters and numbers and partly even words. They point beyond themselves to sounds and meanings. They are given this special function by convention within a nation or by international conventions, as mathematical signs. Sometimes such signs are called symbols; but this is unfortunate because it makes the distinction between signs and symbols more difficult. Decisive is the fact that signs do not participate in the reality of that to which they point, while symbols do. Therefore, signs can be replaced for reasons of expediency or convention, while symbols cannot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, letter) besides that to which the s...ign refers, which may be called the reference of the sign, also what I should like to call the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained. In our example, accordingly, [an example in which lines a, b, and c all intersect at a single point] the reference of the expressions 'the point of intersection of a and b' and 'the point of intersection of b and c' would be the same, but not their senses. The reference of 'evening star' would be the same as that of 'morning star,' but not the sense.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »