The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Any owner of cats will know of what I speak. Cats come at dawn to sit on your bed. They may not nip your nose or inhale your breat...h or make a sound. They simply sit there and stare at you until you open one eyelid and spy them there about to drop dead for need of feeding. So it is with ideas. They come silently in the hour of trying to wake up and remember my name. The notions and fancies sit on the edge of my wits, whisper in my ears and then, if I don't rouse, give more than cats give: a good knock in the head, which gets me out and down to my typewriter before the ideas flee or die or both. In any event, I make the ideas come to me. I do not go to them. I provoke their patience by pretending disregard. This infuriates the latent creature until it is almost raving to be born and once born, nourished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A daughter of Eve ... had better be fifty leagues off--or in her warm bed--or playing with a case-knife--or any thing you please--...than make a man the object of her attention, when the house and all the furniture is her own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity-- Early to bed and early to rise... Make a man healthy and wealth and wise. As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a "suspension of belief." A poet must never make a statement simply because i...t is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a "life-work" of teaching, of social work--we know that we would lay it down with ...hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »