We are tempted to say that his genius was feminine, not masculine. It was such a feminineness, however, as is rarest to find in wo...man, though not the appreciation of it; perhaps it is not to be found at all in woman, but is only the feminine in man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are.... We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it.--Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Unconditional love also includes--the ardent desire to be abused: at that point it is a defiance directed against itself, and out ...of its devotion the very wish for self-annihilation finally arises: "Drown in this sea!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition tha...t man's sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.... Making sense of the world and one's place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.... We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our most characteristically human trait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To die, to sleep-- No more, and by a sleep to say we end... The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to--'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub, For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was the most ungrateful and unjust act ever perpetrated by a republic upon a class of citizens who had worked and sacrificed an...d suffered as did the women of this nation in the struggle of the Civil War only to be rewarded at its close by such unspeakable degradation as to be reduced to the plane of subjects to enfranchised slaves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is easy to talk of sitting at home contented, when others are seeing or making shows. But not to have been where it is supposed..., and seldom supposed falsely, that all would go if they could; to be able to say nothing when everyone is talking; to have no opinion when everyone is judging; to hear exclamations of rapture without power to depress; to listen to falsehoods without right to contradict, is, after all, a state of temporary inferiority, in which the mind is rather hardened by stubbornness, than supported by fortitude. If the world be worth winning let us enjoy it, if it is to be despised let us despise it by conviction. But the world is not to be despised but as it is compared with something better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suppose I now have the reputation of being an inscrutable dipsomaniac. One woman here originated the rumour that I am extremely ...lazy and will never do or finish anything. (I calculate that I must have spent nearly 20,000 hours in writing Ulysses.) A batch of people in Zurich persuaded themselves that I was gradually going mad and actually endeavoured to induce me to enter a sanatorium where a certain Doctor Jung (the Swiss Tweedledum who is not to be confused with the Viennese Tweedledee, Dr. Freud) amuses himself at the expense (in every sense of the word) of ladies and gentlemen who are troubled with bees in their bonnets.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When we think offhand of a politician, we think of a man who works for a partial interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At t...he best it may be his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified. We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word "statesman," when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of interests in the perspective of a longer period of time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »