The Abbe Goussault, a counsellor at High Court, writes [at the end of the 17th century]: "Familiarizing oneself with one's childre...n, getting them to talk about all manner of things, treating them as sensible people and winning them over with sweetness, is an infallible secret for doing what one wants with them. . . . A few caresses, a few little presents, a few words of cordiality and trust make an impression on their minds, and they are few in number that resist these sweet and easy methods of making them persons of honour and probity."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While criticism or fear of punishment may restrain us from doing wrong, it does not make us wish to do right. Disregarding this si...mple fact is the great error into which parents and educators fall when they rely on these negative means of correction. The only effective discipline is self-discipline, motivated by the inner desire to act meritoriously in order to do well in one's own eyes, according to one's own values, so that one may feel good about oneself may "have a good conscience."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking--and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a ...way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt ... [ellipsis in source] the non-essentia...l writer never gets past that wish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Caracal lies on a shelf in its den in the Zoological Gardens quietly licking its fur. I go up and stand near it. It makes a fa...ce at me. I come a little nearer, it makes a worse face and raises itself up on its haunches. I stand and look. It jumps down from its shelf and makes as if it intended "going for" me. I move back; the Caracal has exerted a moral influence over me which I have been unable to resist. Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Knowing what [Christ] knew , knowing all about mankind--ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others di...e, but to die oneself--confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts tha...n the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanized slaves, one fancies oneself a master.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everything is deception: seeking the minimum of illusion, keeping within the ordinary limitations, seeking the maximum. In the fir...st case one cheats the Good, by trying to make it too easy for oneself to get it, and the Evil by imposing all too unfavorable conditions of warfare on it. In the second case one cheats the Good by keeping as aloof from it as possible, and the Evil by hoping to make it powerless through intensifying it to the utmost.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where wit is a form of criticism or mockery, humor includes an element of self-criticism or self-mockery; where wit tends to procl...aim imperfection, humor wryly acknowledges it; where wit undresses you, humor goes naked. At its best, humor simultaneously hurts and heals, makes one larger from a willingness to make oneself less. It has essentially much more breadth than wit, from being much more universal in appeal and human in effect. If harder to translate or explain, it often need not be explained or translated at all, revealing itself in a sudden gesture, a happy juxtaposition. We speak constantly of "the humor of the situation," almost never of the wit; just so, virtually everything that is farcical or funny derives from humor gone a bit wild.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »