To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they ...find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilise them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I almost think we're all of us Ghosts, Pastor Manders. It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that "walks..." in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see Ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be Ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sand of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"O what unlucky streak Twisting inside me, made me break the line?... What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, And what bright unreal path has led me here?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and mak...es it hard for it to free itself from them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The entire construct of the "medical model" of "mental illness"Mwhat is it but an analogy? Between physical medicine and psychiatr...y: the mind is said to be subject to disease in the same manner as the body. But whereas in physical medicine there are verifiable physiological proofs--in damaged or affected tissue, bacteria, inflammation, cellular irregularity--in mental illness alleged socially unacceptable behavior is taken as a symptom, even as proof, of pathology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This land is a little land; too much shut up within the narrow seas, as it seems, to have much space for swelling into hugeness: t...here are no great wastes overwhelming in their dreariness, no great solitudes of forests, no terrible untrodden mountain-walls: all is measured, mingled, varied, gliding easily one thing into another: little rivers, little plains, swelling, speedily- changing uplands, all beset with handsome orderly trees; little hills, little mountains, netted over with the walls of sheep- walks: all is little; yet not foolish and blank, but serious rather, and abundant of meaning for such as choose to seek it: it is neither prison nor palace, but a decent home.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This way could not serve to reach the peak, so Martin began to climb straight up the face of the rocks. Occasionally some root or ...moss patch at which he clutched detached itself from the stone, and feverishly he would seek a support with his foot, or else it was his foothold that gave, and he would be left hanging by his hands and have to pull himself painfully up. The peak was almost within reach when he suddenly slipped and started to slither down, clutching at shrublets of rough flowers; he lost his grip, felt a burning pain as his knee scraped against the rock, attempted to embrace the steepness that was gliding up and past him--and abruptly salvation bumped against his soles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »