"My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly: Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.... Only a habit would cry if she should die...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel that any form of so called psychotherapy is strongly contraindicated for addicts.... The question "Why did you start using ...narcotics in the first place?" should never be asked. It is quite as irrelevant to treatment as it would be to ask a malarial patient why he went to a malarial area.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packa...ged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A child is nothing like a racing car. . . . Souping up babies doesn't work that way. The child is what she is. There is a certain ...irreducible if elusive core. Pushing, pulling, stretching, and shrinking will not really change it. There may be spectacular interim results. The baby may say the alphabet before she walks, master two-times or even ten-times table at three. In the long run, however, this forced precocity tends to be irrelevant. . . . Whatever gains there are become unimportant. The losses can be irrevocable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligenc...e with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good education ought to help people to become both more receptive to and more discriminating about the world: seeing, feeling, a...nd understanding more, yet sorting the pertinent from the irrelevant with an ever finer touch, increasingly able to integrate what they see and to make meaning of it in ways that enhance their ability to go on growing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement. A biography seems irrelevant if it doesn't dis...cover the overlap between what the individual did and the life that made this possible. Without discovering that, you have shapeless happenings and gossip.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the su...bject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Excluded by my birth and tastes from the social order, I was not aware of its diversity.... Nothing in the world was irrelevant: t...he stars on a general's sleeve, the stock-market quotations, the olive harvest, the style of the judiciary, the wheat exchange, flower-beds.... Nothing. This order, fearful and feared, whose details were all inter-related, had a meaning: my exile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is just as wrong to judge paintings from the point of view of pictures as it is to judge pictures from the point of view of pai...nting. A painting has its own rule, its own justification within itself. A picture has its criterion outside itself, in the external reality it imitates. Several critics have recently made the remark that nonrepresentational art has this major defect, that being unrelated to external reality, it has no criterion by which it can be judged. The argument would be valid if the art of painting were the art of picturing. As it is, all judgments and appreciations of paintings founded upon their relation to an external model are irrelevant to painting. A painting is the embodiment of a form in a matter; the whole being of a picture is determined by the relationship that obtains between the image itself and some external reality.... As compared with a painting, whose ultimate end is to achieve a fitting object of contemplation, images are characterized by their ambition to represent all the objects they include, and to represent these objects with all the details that are compatible with their pictorial representation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »