The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has bee...n that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The finished man of the world must eat of every apple at once. He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not remember spi...te. He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men only as channels of power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Entification begins at arm's length; the points of condensation in the primordial conceptual scheme are things glimpsed, not glimp...ses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Channing you have seen and described is the real Simon Pure. You have seen him. Many a good ramble may you have together! You ...will see in him still more of the same kind to attract and to puzzle you. How to serve him most effectually has long been a problem with his friends. Perhaps it is left for you to solve it. I suspect that the most you or any one can do for him is to appreciate his genius,--to buy and read, and cause others to buy and read, his poems. That is the hand which he has put forth to the world,--take hold of that. Review them if you can,--perhaps take the risk of publishing something more which he may write. Your knowledge of Cowper will help you to know Channing. He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning, unless the aspects of the sky are particularly auspicious. He will ever be "reserved and enigmatic," and you must deal with him at arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Her personality had an architectonic quality; I think of her when I see some of the great London railway termini, especially St. P...ancras, with its soot and turrets, and she overshadowed her own daughters, whom she did not understand--my mother, who liked things to be nice; my dotty aunt. But my mother had not the strength to put even some physical distance between them, let alone keep the old monster at emotional arm's length.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the earl...y Christians felt the Cross. The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring,--scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair's-breadth further for respect of power,--while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trees lay at full length, four or five feet deep, and crossing each other in all directions, all black as charcoal, but perfec...tly sound within, still good for fuel or for timber; soon they would be cut into lengths and burnt again. Here were thousands of cords, enough to keep the poor of Boston and New York amply warm for a winter, which only cumbered the ground and were in the settler's way. And the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire, like shavings, and no man warmed by it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... we, like so many others who think more of working than of dying, care only to push on steadily, wishing less for cessation of ...toil than for strength to keep at it; and for wisdom to make it worthy of the ideal of labor and of life which we believe to be the most precious gift of Heaven to any soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People are always dying in the Times who don't seem to die in other papers, and they die at greater length and maybe even with a l...ittle more grace.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »