There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus which says: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows o...ne big thing." Scholars have differed about the correct interpretation of these dark words, which may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defence. But, taken figuratively, the words can be made to yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general. For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.... Their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classifica tion, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is on...e of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedge...hog.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You see, the sadness is that rainbows follow rainbows, and they last no longer than shooting starsif we knew that we would never c...ome out of the gourd, would we have entered it? I say that God's wrath is on all creatures and, in the end, for him goodness and evil are the samehe kills you.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Publicity! publicity! was the persistent demand. To meet the demand, small papers, owned and edited by women, sprang up all over t...he land, and like Jonah's gourd, perished in a night.... No use waiting to learn to put two consecutive sentences together in any connected form, or for an idea or the power of expressing it. One woman was printing her productions, and why should not all the rest do likewise? They had so long followed some leader like a flock of sheep, that now they would rush through the first gap into newspaperdom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, m...an bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Indian said that he had got his money by hunting, mostly high up the West Branch of the Penobscot, and toward the head of the ...St. John; he had hunted there from a boy, and knew all about that region. His game had been beaver, otter, black cat (or fisher), sable, moose, etc. Loup-cervier (or Canada lynx) were plenty yet in burnt grounds. For food in the woods, he uses partridges, ducks, dried moose-meat, hedgehog, etc. Loons, too, were good, only "bile 'em good." He told us at some length how he had suffered from starvation when a mere lad, being overtaken by winter when hunting with two grown Indians in the northern part of Maine, and obliged to leave their canoe on account of ice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nodding, its great head rattling like a gourd, And locks like seaweed strung on the stinking stone,... The nightmare stumbles past,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ah done been in sorrow's kitchen and Ah done licked out all de pots. Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, an...d Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »