Suffering predisposes the mind to devoutness; and most young girls, prompted by instinctive tenderness, lean towards mysticism, th...e obscurer side of religion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same r...oad, one of them has to give place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between a photograph and even the most realistic painting--say, one of Courbet's landscapes--is that in the latter ...there has been selection, emphasis and some discreet distortion. The painter's deep instinctive feeling for mass and force has rearranged everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminati...ng? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand, a quite unclouded, quite unhypothetical assumption of aesthetic theory ("high ideals"), on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humour, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground. The very accent of the words "Highbrow" and "Lowbrow" implies an instinctive perception that this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. For both are used in a derogatory sense. The "Highbrow" is the superior person whose virtue is admitted but felt to be an inept unpalatable virtue; while the "Lowbrow" is a good fellow one readily takes to, but with a certain scorn for him and all his works.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, p...olitical cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being s...o impoverished which are given to those of us who don't sell anything to anybody.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could co...nscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And yet for all this help of head and brain How happily instinctive we remain,... Our best guide upward further to the light, Passionate preference such as love at sight.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Athletes and actors--let actors stand for the set of performing artists--share much. They share the need to make gesture as fluid ...and economical as possible, to make out of a welter of choices the single, precisely right one. They share the need for impeccable and split-second timing. They share the need for thousands of hours of practice in order to train the body to become the perfect, instinctive instrument to express. Both athlete and actor, out of that congeries of emotion, choice, strategy, knowledge of terrain, mood of spectators, condition of spectators in the ensemble, secret awareness of injury or weakness, and as nearly an absolute concentration as possible so that all externalities are integrated, all distraction absorbed to the self, must be able to change the self so successfully that it changes us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is there anything in which the people of this age and country differ more from those of other lands and former times than in this-...-their ability to preserve order and protect rights without the aid of government? ... We are realizing the paradox, "that country is governed best which is governed least." I no longer fear lynch law. Let the people be intelligent and good, and I am not sure but their impulsive, instinctive verdicts and sentences and executions, unchecked by the rules and technicalities of law, are more likely to be according to substantial justice than the decisions of courts and juries.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »