"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognise out of a number of facts which are incidental and... which are vital.... I would call your attention to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgmen...ts of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time a...s nightmare; though, to be sure, the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended, a quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that death is a "lark" undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, a revelation, in the other, to a further flight and concealment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities,... with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average... conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers' glory--to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How marvellous it all is! Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men's hands; cemented with men's honest blood and with a... world of tears, welded by the best brains of centuries past; not without the taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human, and yet not wholly human--for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, unmeaning inconven...ience to passers-by.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me ...about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »