Faced with even a temporary delay or absence, children pound and scream and bawl; but as soon as the situation changes, they are b...afflingly sunny, and take their gratification with relish, or feel secure again when mother returns. It is said that "children cannot wait," but just the contrary is true. It is children who can wait, by making dramatic scenes (not otherwise than religious people get through hours of stress by singing hymns). They have a spontaneous mechanism to cushion even minor troubles. Rather it is the adults who have inhibited their spontaneous expression, who cannot wait; we swallow our disappointment and always taste what we have swallowed. For where the occasions of passion occur, where there is actual frustration and misery, and yet anger and grief are not explosively released, then the disposition itself is soured, and such happiness as follows is never full and unclouded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
American manners have evolved in a climate in many ways very different from those of the civilization to which most Americans owe ...their heritage. In most European countries manners have evolved as fences, and conventions of public behavior have been devised to protect one's "place." The shopkeeper had one set of manners toward his customers and another toward his employees, as the butler did toward his "master" and toward the servants, and the squire toward his gamekeeper and his mother-in-law. The idea that manners should be an expression of general regard for one's fellow man is the product of a society that hoped to be classless, and though it has fallen far short of its intentions, our conventions are the very opposite of those designed to protect one class from another. What we have tried to do in America is to perpetuate a set of conventions that give the impression of not being conventions at all but attitudes which, we hope, indicate that one of us is as good as another, as deserving of consideration, and as responsible for maintaining a state of good will. Almost as far back as one can go in the literature (if it can be called that) of American etiquette, one finds that manners are referred to as "minor morals."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely... try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are few books which are fit to be remembered in our wisest hours, but the Iliad is brightest in the serenest days, and embod...ies still all the sunlight that fell on Asia Minor. No modern joy or ecstasy of ours can lower its height or dim its lustre, but there it lies in the east of literature, as it were the earliest and latest production of the mind. The ruins of Egypt oppress and stifle us with their dust, foulness preserved in cassia and pitch, and swathed in linen; the death of that which never lived. But the rays of Greek poetry struggle down to us, and mingle with the sunbeams of the recent day. The statue of Memnon is cast down, but the shaft of the Iliad still meets the sun in his rising.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more ...only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,--those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If, for instance, they have heard something from the postman, they attribute it to "a semi-official statement"; if they have falle...n into conversation with a stranger at a bar, they can conscientiously describe him as "a source that has hitherto proved unimpeachable." It is only when the journalist is reporting a whim of his own, and one to which he attaches minor importance, that he defines it as the opinion of "well-informed circles."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poet, the dramatist, the novelist are free to exercise their imagination as widely as they choose. But the historian may not b...e allowed so long a tether. He must fulfill his function as creative artist only within very rigid limits. He cannot invent what went on in the mind of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The poet can. He cannot suppress inconvenient minor characters and invent others who more significantly underline the significance of his theme. The novelist can. The dramatist can. The historian, as Sir Phillip Sydney has said, "is captive to the truth of a foolish world." Not only is he captive to the truth of a foolish world, but he is captive to a truth he can never fully discover, and yet he is forbidden by his conscience and his training from inventing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thru all the tumult and the strife, I hear that music ringing.... It sounds and echoes in my soul; How can I keep from singing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We can teach prevention. For little kids, the best protection is that they should not be alone in public places. All children shou...ld be conscious of strangers, and be discriminating and wary of them. This won't make them grow up suspicious as long as they have adults around whom they know and can trust: relatives, friends of their parents, parents of friends.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »