Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures per...fect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let man consider what he is in comparison with all existence; let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature; and ...from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him estimate at their true value the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself. What is a man in the infinite?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That the world is not the embodiment of an eternal rationality can be conclusively proved by the fact that the piece of the world ...that we know--I mean our human reason--is not so very rational. And if it is not eternally and completely wise and rational, then the rest of the world will not be either; here the conclusion a minori ad majus, a parte ad totum applies, and does so with decisive force.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They are as sick that surfeit with too much as they that starve with nothing. It is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in th...e mean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think w...e mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed words are dominated by one parent while the other is recessive. The way a word is used this year is its phenotype, but it has deeply immutable meanings, often hidden, which is its genotype.... The separate languages of the Indo-European family were at one time, perhaps five thousand years ago, maybe much longer, a single language. The separation of the speakers by migrations had effects on language comparable to the speciation observed by Darwin on various islands of the Galapagos. Languages became different species, retaining enough resemblance to an original ancestor so that the family resemblance can still be seen.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »