... if the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and sp...iritual impulse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything that was ever to happen to me in the future had its germ or impulse in the conditions of my life on Dover Street. My fr...iendships, my advantages and disadvantages, my gifts, my habits, my ambitions--these were the materials out of which I built my after life, in the open workshop of America. My days in the slums were pregnant with possibilities; it only needed the ripeness of events to make them fruit forth in realities. Steadily as I worked to win America, America advanced to lie at my feet. I was an heir, on Dover Street, awaiting maturity. I was a princess waiting to be led to the throne.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to kee...p on looking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved.... Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We walk along the cliff, and I feel a sudden impulse to push you over, which I promptly do: I acted on impulse, yet I certainly in...tended to push you over, and may even have devised a little ruse to achieve it; yet even then I did not act deliberately, for I did not (stop to) ask myself whether to do it or not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nev...ertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man.... Instead of b...eing a sudden impulse full of ardour and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nothing makes a man feel older than to hear a band coming up the street and not to have the impulse to rush downstairs and out on ...to the sidewalk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine o...il over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure an...d pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature's workings. Otherwise there would be no impulse to satisfy the needs which ensure the body's and the species' survival. And survival--for reasons we do not know--is inwritten, inscribed as nature's only goal. Gratification, or its anticipation, acts as a goad. Pain or the fear of pain acts as a warning. Both are essential. The difference between them, considered as opposites, is that pleasure has a constant tendency to exceed its functional purpose, to not know its place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »