Everyone was tired with the old style politicians and their flowery rhetoric. I just told them there are tough times ahead, but th...at they would be less tough with me in charge.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of "style." But while style--deriving from... the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets--suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnson's Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at it--the sty...le, the sentiments are inimitable--but the subject is dreadful--and, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble--O heavens! how dreadful, how terrible it is to be told by a man of his genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real happiness is ever unattainable in this world!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old saying of Buffon's that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can get--but then most men mistake grammar for... style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the... purpose which had dictated its original erection was the same with that to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of mediaevalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time. Here at least the spirit of the ancient builders was at one with the spirit of the modern beholder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents--about like... a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and "the rest of mankind," are growled about in "old-soldier" style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here is the mistake of the cut-and-dried man of culture. He goes about with the secret of having learned to appreciate the "grand ...style." He has lived in Homer till he can recall the roll of that many-sounding sea. He has pored over the lofty and pictorial thought of Plato till he begins to pique himself upon its grandeur. His fancy has been fed on the quaint old-world genius of Herodotus, his judgment on the melancholy wisdom of Tacitus and the complacent cynicism of Gibbon--and of all this he is conscious and proud.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »