Paper is soft and ink is fluid; it might be better if some pages of this chronicle could be written on chips of granite at the poi...nt of steel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach th...e white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in A...sia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lost at night in an immense forest, I only have a small light to guide me. A man appears who tells me: "My friend, blow out your c...andle in order to find your way." This man is a theologian. The sea, fluid garden filled with animals and plants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is... a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sensual man conforms thoughts to things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; ...the other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Society is an illusion to the young citizen. It lies before him in rigid repose, with certain names, men, and institutions, rooted... like oak-trees to the centre, round which all arrange themselves the best they can. But the old statesman knows that society is fluid; there are no such roots and centres; but any particle may suddenly become the centre of the movement, and compel the system to gyrate round it, as every man of strong will, like Pisistratus, or Cromwell, does for a time, and every man of truth, like Plato, or Paul, does forever.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plasti...c and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion, and an English man of War;... Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid but Slow in his performances. Shakespeare with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »