When we sent our first child off to school I experienced a jarring moment, an epiphany. I had been teaching young children for man...y years, advising parents on a wide range of issues, including the best and most painless ways to separate from their youngsters at school. When my own time came, I found that all my good advice to others was impossible to follow myself.... I felt like a midwife friend of mine who had assisted in the births of hundreds of babies before her own first child was born. In the middle of labor she cried out, "I've told hundreds of women, 'you can do it,' and it can't be done."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The intellectual is a middle-class product; if he is not born into the class he must soon insert himself into it, in order to exis...t. He is the fine nervous flower of the bourgeoisie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is fi...nished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The misery of the middle-aged woman is a grey and hopeless thing, born of having nothing to live for, of disappointment and resent...ment at having been gypped by consumer society, and surviving merely to be the butt of its unthinking scorn.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.... Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast, In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such Whether he thinks too little or too much: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled; The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are ...radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle aged ... run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood--a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Youth! There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in Life's lumber-room. But youth is the Lor...d of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it. Every one is born a king, and most people die in exile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated lo...neliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must the...refore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul...; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »