Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and ...sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of depar...ture which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the storm rattles my windowpane I'll stay hunched at my desk, it will roar in vain... For I'll have plunged deep inside the thrill Of conjuring spring with the force of my will, Coaxing the sun from my heart, and building here Out of my fiery thoughts, a tepid atmosphere.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men's private self-worlds are rather like our geographical world's seasons, storm, and sun, deserts, oases, mountains and abysses,... the endless-seeming plateaus, darkness and light, and always the sowing and the reaping.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One should speak of television's cold light, and why it is inoffensive to the imagination (including the imagination of children).... It is innocuous because it no longer conveys an imaginary, for the simple reason that it is no longer an image. Here it contrasts with the cinema which (though increasingly contaminated by television) is still endowed with an intense imaginary--because it is an image. This is not simply to speak of film as a mere screen or visual form, but as a myth, something that still resembles a double, a mirror, a fantasy, a dream, etc. None of this is in the TV image. It doesn't suggest anything, it mesmerizes.... It is only a screen or, better, it is a miniaturized terminal that immediately appears in your head (you are the screen and the television is watching you), transistorizes all your neurons and passes for a magnetic tape--a tape, not an image.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »