An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confr...onted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Conscience ... lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure being. It lives in drea...d of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being.... Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called 'beautiful soul,' its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and... Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself-- Yea, all which it inherit--shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O animal excellence, Take pterodactyl flight... Fire-winged into the air And find your lair With cunning sense On some Arabian bight....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am dead against art's being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author...--detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower's pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl's lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced pe...ople endeavour to do, he drowns.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 resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful tone ...is silenced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Otis's apparatus recovers the uncounted planes that have been floating in the thin air of speculation and reveals their superiorit...y in a metropolitan paradox: the greater the distance from the earth, the closer the communication with what remains of nature (i.e. light and air). The elevator is the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy: the further up it goes, the more undesirable the circumstances it leaves behind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »