While you continue to grow fatter and richer publishing your nauseating confectionery, I shall become a mole, digging here, rootin...g there, stirring up the whole rotten mess where life is hard, raw and ugly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Life is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though Americans talk a good deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who a...re serious. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
America is hard to see. Less partial witnesses than he... In book on book have testified They could not see it from outside....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I tell you that I would be disobeying the god and on that account it is impossible for me to keep quiet, you won't be persuaded... by me, taking it that I am ironizing. And if I tell you that it is the greatest good for a human being to have discussions every day about virtue and the other things you hear me talking about, examining myself and others, and that the unexamined life is not livable for a human being, you will be even less persuaded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life... is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Had I but died an hour before this chance, I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant... There's nothing serious in mortality. All is but toys; renown and grace is dead, The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees Is left this vault to brag of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but li...fe will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »