Men, my dear, are very queer animals, a mixture of horse- nervousness, ass-stubbornness, and camel-malice--with an angel bobbing a...bout unexpectedly like the apple in the posset, and when they can do exactly as they please, they are very hard to drive. Oh, England. Sick in head and sick in heart, Sick in whole and every part, And yet sicker thou art still For thinking that thou art not ill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all such accidents. We do not make up history and culture. We simply appear, not by our own choice. We make what we can of ...our condition with the means available. We must accept the mixture as we find it--the impurity of it, the tragedy of it, the hope of it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a cunning mixture of sentiment, pity, tenderness, irony surrounds adolescence, what knowing watchfulness! Young birds on thei...r first flight are hardly so hovered around.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All cultural products contain a mixture of two elements: conventions and inventions. Conventions are elements which are known to b...oth the creator and his audience beforehand--they consist of things like favorite plots, stereotyped characters, accepted ideas, commonly known metaphors and other linguistic devices, etc. Inventions, on the other hand, are elements which are uniquely imagined by the creator, such as new kinds of characters, ideas, or linguistic forms.... Convention and invention have quite different cultural functions. Conventions represent familiar shared images and meanings and they assert an ongoing continuity of values; inventions confront us with a new perception of meaning which we have not realized before. Both these functions are important to culture. Conventions help maintain a culture's stability while inventions help it respond to changing circumstances and provide new information about the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Nature's law says that the strong must prevent the weak from living, but only in a newspaper article or textbook can this be packa...ged into a comprehensible thought. In the soup of everyday life, in the mixture of minutia from which human relations are woven, it is not a law. It is a logical incongruity when both strong and weak fall victim to their mutual relations, unconsciously subservient to some unknown guiding power that stands outside of life, irrelevant to man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeur... at another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In spite of the fact that religion looks backward to revealed truth while science looks forward to new vistas and discoveries, bot...h activities produce a sense of awe and a curious mixture of humility and arrogance in their practitioners. All great scientists are inspired by the subtlety and beauty of the natural world that they are seeking to understand. Each new subatomic particle, every unexpected object, produces delight and wonderment. In constructing their theories, physicists are frequently guided by arcane concepts of elegance in the belief that the universe is intrinsically beautiful.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With my desire to write he seemed in full sympathy, and in urging our early marriage he argued that my first necessity was leisure... in which to develop and to master my craft. It appeared to me that with such a man as teacher and guide I could not fail, and it was in a queer mixture of young love and vaulting ambition that I became a wife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »