The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yes, that's what I needed. Living flesh from humans for my experiments. What difference did it make if a few people had to die? Th...eir flesh taught me how to manufacture arms, legs, faces that are human. I'll make a crippled world whole again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is born with the potential ability to learn Chinese or Swahili, play a kazoo, climb a tree, make a strudel or a birdhouse,... take pleasure in finding the coordinates of a star. Genetic inheritance determines a child's abilities and weaknesses. But those who raise a child call forth from that matrix the traits and talents they consider important.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of our occupations are low comedy.... We must play our part duly, but as the part of a borrowed character. Of the mask and ap...pearance we must not make a real essence, nor of what is foreign what is our very own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Micawber] is not only the greatest of Dickens' comic figures, but, with the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic f...igure in the whole range of English literature, a literature supremely rich in such characters. Falstaff is greater because he is himself a comic genius; in him the two familiar types of characters, the comic rogue and the comic butt, are combined, for he is a comic rogue who is his own butt, and as such he is unique. To this must be added his extraordinary versatility, the teeming abundance of his wit and humour, ranging from crude horse-play to a kind of comic philosophy, which is only displayed within a comparatively small compass ... but makes him tower over every other comic character. Micawber must be included in quite another category, namely, that of the great solemn fools, who do not offer us their wit and humour but only themselves, who do not make jokes but are themselves one endless joke. If Micawber--and all the persons of his kind (and most of us have known a few)Mshould realise even for a moment that he is funny, he would be ruined for us; but happily he does not, and while we are actually in his presence--and what a presence--we too must be as solemn as he is, the greatest of all the great solemn fools.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it ...is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »