[T]he minister preached a sermon on Jonah and the whale, at the end of which an old chief arose and declared, "We have heard sever...al of the white people talk and lie; we know they will lie, but this is the biggest lie we ever heard."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? You neve...r wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud, and what changes a darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy. Well, if I could discover just one of these things--what eternity is, for example--I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the mo...ralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the shape of the tree, And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful pilgrims:... This is what you are to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have ever watched an artist constructing with bits of cold stone a beautiful living picture you know that he works faithful...ly and carefully on the pattern from the wrong side and while he is working every inequality, every tint a little too dull is apparent to him as his picture grows, but he works on and on. And even when he finishes at last and looks down at the completed pattern he is not discouraged to see here a little crevice and there a little roughness, an open seam here, a tiny patch there where the bit of marble was too small. Now he pours his cement over it and smoothes [sic] it into every seam, and with faith puts his work to dry. Next day the pattern is turned and the perfect whole is given to view, needing only the polishing of a loving hand to make it ready to slip in place. So we should work faithfully on our pattern, cement it together with ourselves, and polish it with human kindness; and lo! the work slips into place seemingly a perfect whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced ...to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it thr...eatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more... easily he will triumph over it. For him it is not a question of copying, but of interpreting in a simpler and more luminous language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismis...s names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity--their links with their dead and the unborn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »