What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong... Like "rent," "feeding a wife," "satisfying a man."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The organizations of men, like men themselves, seem subject to deafness, nearsightedness, lameness, and involuntary cruelty. We se...em tragically unable to help one another, to understand one another.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wealth and prosperity of the country are only the comeliness of the body, the fullness of the flesh and fat; but the spirit is... independent of them; it requires only muscle, bone and nerve for the true exercise of its functions. We cannot lose our liberty, because we cannot cease to think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is infli...cted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an esoteric doctrine of society that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands an...d legs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process ...known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of livin...g in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »