A bestial and violent man will go so far as to kill because he is under the influence of drink, exasperated, or driven by rage and... alcohol. He is paltry. He does not know the pleasure of killing, the charity of bestowing death like a caress, of linking it with the play of the noble wild beasts: every cat, every tiger, embraces its prey and licks it even while it destroys it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the artist's seizing any one object from nature, that object no longer is part of nature. One can go so far as to say that the ...artist creates the object in that very moment by emphasizing its significant, characteristic, and interesting aspects or, rather, by adding the higher values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Powerful men in particular suffer from the delusion that human beings have no memories. I would go so far as to say that the disti...nguishing trait of powerful men is the psychotic certainty that people forget acts of infamy as easily as their parents' birthdays.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Undoubtedly we have not questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believ...e that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know of only one mystical poem that is satisfactorily successful, The Obscure Night of the Soul, by St. John of the Cross. In th...at amazing poem, what is said counts for almost nothing, but is sublimated into the purposed significance. The artist does not intend to go so far as that, but in seeking an incorruptible unity, he is always something of a mystic. Unlike the mystic, he clings to the world of things, though he transmutes it. He can never say the whole of what he means, but the mystic cannot say at all what he means; for his meaning is something singular and indivisible, something absolute in its inexpressibility. The simple lover in Cyrano can only say "I love you," but the poet Cyrano can say the same thing in a hundred elaborate ways.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Tall tales" were told of the sociability of the Texans, one even going so far as to picture a member of the Austin colony forcing... a stranger at the point of a gun to visit him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We shall find of him A shrewd contriver; and, you know, his means,... If he improve them, may well stretch so far As to annoy us all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ratcliffe was a great statesman. The smoothness of his manipulation was marvelous. No other man in politics, indeed no other man w...ho had ever been in politics in this country, could--his admirers said--have brought together so many hostile interests and made so fantastic a combination. Some men went so far as to maintain that he would "rope in the President himself before the old man had time to swap knives with him." The beauty of his work consisted in the skill with which he evaded questions of principle. As he wisely said, the issue now involved was not one of principle but of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mr. Goodman's book The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight has enjoyed very good press. It has been lengthily reviewed in the leading dail...ies and weeklies. It has been called "impressive and convincing." The author has been credited with "deep insight" into an "essentially modern" character. Passages have been quoted to demonstrate his efficient handling of nutshells. One critic went so far as to take his hat off to Mr. Goodman--who, let it be added, had used his own merely to talk through it. In a word, Mr. Goodman has been patted on the back when he ought to have been rapped on the knuckles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »