Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the la...bors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All things are flowing, even those that seem immovable. The adamant is always passing into smoke. The plants imbibe the materials ...which they want from the air and the ground. They burn, that is, exhale and decompose their own bodies into the air and earth again. The animal burns, or undergoes the like perpetual consumption. The earth burns, the mountains burn and decompose, slower, but incessantly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should ...be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Un...doubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spe...nd all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling aroun...d, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "...I seek God! I seek God!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »