The great practical difference between the word, written or spoken, and the visual image is that we cannot read the former unless ...we have been initiated into the mystery of language, whereas visual images can be made intelligible to all men who have eyes.... The spiritual difference between the written word and the visual image is equally great. Precise though a word is, evocative though it be, the actual machinery of visual perception is not engaged. All that takes place, takes place now within the mind; the retina and the neurons sleep; we are in a world which has been created by old, long-stored stimuli; the accidents of energy exterior to ourselves have been totally excluded from it. Even the spoken word is further from this spiritual purity than the word upon the page, for sounds have at least a sensual immediacy of a sort, but the written word is only the ghost of a sound. We have entered now into a realm not of images but of substitutes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The town is divided into various groups, which form so many little states, each with its own laws and customs, its jargon and its ...jokes. While the association holds and the fashion lasts, they admit nothing well said or well done except by one of themselves, and they are incapable of appeciating anything from another source, to the point of despising those who are not initiated into their mysteries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mys...teries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, bu...t, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces--in the beginning, there was spice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I will keep America moving forward, always forward--for a better America, for an endless enduring dream and a thousand points of l...ight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »