The needs of a society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is that man who is offered only the crumbs... from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic who buys forty-dollar shoes is not criticized but is appreciated. We know that they have put to use their full mental and physical powers. Each single gain feeds into the gains of the body collective.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art has no cosmology, it gives us no view of the universe; every distinct work of art gives us a little cosmology of its own, and ...no ingenuity will combine all these into a single whole. But religion is essentially cosmological, though its cosmology is always an imaginative cosmology. Any given religious experience can be fitted by this cosmology into the scheme of the whole, and labeled as an ascent into the third heaven, a temptation of the devil, and so forth. Hence religion is social, as art can never be. The sociability of artists is a paradoxical and precarious thing, and ceases the instant they begin their actual artistic work. But the sociability of religion is part of its fundamental nature. The life of religion is always the life of a church.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem,--how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual stron...g, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat: the body would feast. The soul says, The man and the woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Almost every man we meet requires some civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or ...philanthropy in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the most worn, pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's life, the greatest part is incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable,... and must be, until he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I? What has my will done to make me that I am? Nothing. I have been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appreciable degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Beside all the moral benefit which we may expect from the farmer's profession, when a man enters it considerately, this promised t...he conquering of the soil, plenty, and beyond this, the adorning of the country with every advantage and ornament which labor, ingenuity, and affection for a man's home, could suggest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Central heating, French rubber goods, and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art..., and of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But the worst one of all to leave uncurbed, Unsocialized, is ingenuity:... Which for no sordid self-aggrandizement, For nothing but its own blind satisfaction ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »