If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift... of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A submissive spirit might be patient, a strong understanding would supply resolution, but here was something more; here was that e...lasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from Nature alone. It was the choicest gift of heaven.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating m...ysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The vulgar look upon a man, who is reckoned a fine speaker, as a phenomenon, a supernatural being, and endowed with some peculiar ...gift of Heaven; they stare at him, if he walks in the park, and cry, that is he. You will, I am sure, view him in a juster light, and nulla formidine. You will consider him only as a man of good sense, who adorns common thoughts with the graces of elocution, and the elegancy of style. The miracle will then cease.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speech is after all only a system of gestures, having the peculiarity that each gesture produces a characteristic sound, so that i...t can be perceived through the ear as well as through the eye. Listening to a speaker instead of looking at him tends to make us think of speech as essentially a system of sounds; but it is not; essentially it is a system of gestures made with the lungs and larynx, and the cavities of the mouth and nose. We get still farther away from the fundamental facts about speech when we think of it as something that can be written and read, forgetting that what writing, in our clumsy notations, can represent is only a small part of the spoken sound, where pitch and stress, tempo and rhythm, are almost entirely ignored. But even a writer or reader, unless the words are to fall flat or meaningless, must speak them soundlessly to himself. The written or printed book is only a series of hints, as elliptical as the neumes of Byzantine music, from which the reader thus works out for himself the speech-gestures which alone have the gift of expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Envy has blackened every page of his history.... The future, in its justice, will number him among those men whom passions and an ...excess of activity have condemned to unhappiness, through the gift of genius.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »