To be in a world which is a hell, to be of that world and neither to believe in or guess at anything but that world is not merely ...hell but the only possible damnation: the act of a man damning himself. It may be--I hope it is--redemption to guess and perhaps perceive that the universe, the hell which we see for all its beauty, vastness, majesty, is only part of a whole which is quite unimaginable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes does it make any difference whether Shake...speare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if A Midsummer Night's Dream was really a dream?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What these perplexities of my uncle Toby were,--'tis impossible for you to guess;Mif you could,--I should blush ... as an author; ...inasmuch as I set no small store by myself upon this very account, that my reader has never yet been able to guess at any thing. And ... if I thought you was able to form the least ... conjecture to yourself, of what was to come in the next page,--I would tear it out of my book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While lying there listening to the Indians, I amused myself with trying to guess at their subject by their gestures, or some prope...r name introduced. There can be no more startling evidence of their being a distinct and comparatively aboriginal race than to hear this unaltered Indian language, which the white man cannot speak nor understand. We may suspect change and deterioration in almost every other particular but the language which is so wholly unintelligible to us. It took me by surprise, though I had found so many arrowheads, and convinced me that the Indian was not the invention of historians and poets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion--these are the most valuable coin of the t...hinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I guess the real reason that my wife and I had children is the same reason that Napoleon had for invading Russia: it seemed like a... good idea at the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew--... Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being so slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the liste...ner anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining.... If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.... When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Christopher Cross: You shouldn't be alone in the street so late at night. Kitty March: I was coming home from work.... Christopher Cross: You work this late? Kitty March: Mmm, hmmm. Christopher Cross: What do you do? Kitty March: Guess. Christopher Cross: You're an actress. Kitty March: Oh, you are clever!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »