Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly ...possible.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Philosophy is written in this grand book--I mean the universe-- which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be u...nderstood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as t...hrough a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart's music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sum...s of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can't be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual--that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked--is surely at the core of our culture's fascination with pornography.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though learned, well-bred; and though well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and humanly severe:... Who to a friend his faults can freely show, And gladly praise the merit of a foe?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love without marriage can sometimes be very awkward for all concerned; but marriage without love simply removes that institution f...rom the territory of the humanly admissible, to my mind. Love is a state in which one lives who loves, and whoever loves has given himself away; love then, and not marriage, is belong ing. Marriage is a public declaration of a man and a woman that they have formed a secret alliance, with the intention to belong to, and share with each other, a mystical estate; mystical exactly in the sense that the real experience cannot be communicated to others, nor explained even to oneself on rational grounds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Always be on time. Never try to make any personal engagements. Do as little talking as humanly possible. Never be disturbed by any...thing. Always do what you're told to do as quickly as possible. Remember to lean back in a parade, so that people can see your husband. Don't get too fat to ride three on a seat. Get out of the way as quickly as you're not needed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without some...thing divine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more... Than human voice, that, also, cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »