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 »
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in hi...s assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men have defined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments, however radical in intent or consequence, are with or ag...ainst assertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is made credible or authentic by the power of men to name.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a democracy, the will of the people is supreme. In a republic, it is not the will of the people but the rational consensus of t...he people--a rational consensus which is implicit in the term consent--which governs the people. That is to say, in a democracy, popular passion may rule--may, though it need not--but in a republic, popular passion is regarded as unfit to rule, and the precautions are taken to see that it is subdued rather than sovereign. In a democracy all politicians are, to some degree, demagogues: They appeal to people's prejudices and passions, they incite their expectations by making reckless promises, they endeavor to ingratiate themselves with the electorate in every possible way. In a republic, there are not supposed to be such politicians, only statesmen--sober, unglamorous, thoughtful men who are engaged in a kind of perpetual conversation with the citizenry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Recreation carries with it a sense of necessity and purpose. However pleasurable this antidote to work may be, it's a form of acti...ve employment, engaged in with a specific end in mind--a refreshment of the spirit, or the body, or both. Implicit in this idea of renewal--usually organized renewal--is the notion that recreation is a consequence of work and a preparation for more of it.... Leisure is not tied to work the way that recreation is--leisure is self-contained. The root of the word is the Latin licere which means "to be permitted," suggesting that leisure is about freedom. But freedom for what? According to Chesterton's cheerful view, leisure was above all an opportunity to do nothing. When he said "doing nothing," however, he was describing not emptiness but an occasion for reflection and contemplation, a chance to look inward rather than outward.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Your conscious probably hasn't much use for my unconscious. But I have implicit faith in my unconscious; it will be able to cope w...ith your conscious.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A noble person confers no such gift as his whole confidence: none so exalts the giver and the receiver; it produces the truest gra...titude. Perhaps it is only essential to friendship that some vital trust should have been reposed by the one in the other. I feel addressed and probed even to the remotest parts of my being when one nobly shows, even in trivial things, an implicit faith in me.... A threat or a curse may be forgotten, but this mild trust translates me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a ...direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults. A cult differs from a formal religion in many significant ways. It is in the nature of a cult to claim some esoteric knowledge which has been submerged (or repressed by orthodoxy) for a long time but has now suddenly been illuminated. There is often some heterodox figure, mocked or scorned by the orthodox, who presents these new teachings. There are communal rites which often permit or spur an individual to act out impulses that had hitherto been repressed. In the cult, one feels as though one were exploring novel or hitherto taboo modes of conduct. What defines a cult, therefore, is its implicit emphasis on magic rather than theology, on the personal tie to a guru or to the group, rather than to an institution or a creed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In so far as religion assumes the world to be directed by conscious agents who may be turned from their purpose by persuasion, it ...stands in fundamental antagonism to magic as well as to science, both of which take for granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. In magic, indeed, the assumption is only implicit, but in science it is explicit. It is true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but whenever it does so in its proper form, it treats them in exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do. Thus it assumes that all personal beings, whether human or divine, are in the last resort subject to those impersonal forces which control all things, but which nevertheless can be turned to account by any one who knows how to manipulate them by the appropriate ceremonies and spells.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even if fathers are more benignly helpful, and even if they spend time with us teaching us what they know, rarely do they tell us ...what they feel. They stand apart emotionally: strong perhaps, maybe caring in a nonverbal, implicit way; but their internal world remains mysterious, unseen, "What are they really like?" we ask ourselves. "What do they feel about us, about the world, about themselves?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »