And this mighty master of the organ of language, who knew its every stop and pipe, who could awaken at will the thin silver tones ...of its slenderest reeds or the solemn cadence of its deepest thunder, who could make it sing like a flute or roar like a cataract, he was born into a country without literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is... but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art includes everything that stimulates the desire to live; science, everything that sharpens the desire to know. Art, even the mo...st disinterested, the most disembodied, is the auxiliary of life. Born of the sensibility, it sows and creates it in its turn. It is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life. Science, or to use a broader term, knowledge, has its end in itself, apart from any idea of life and propagation of the species. Intelligence, that sublimation of the sensibility, that organ of the need to know, is sterilized sensibility. To know, and to know still more--the instinct for knowledge is insatiable, because the subject of knowledge is limitless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only power deserving the name is that of masses, and of governments while they make themselves the organ of the tendencies and... instincts of masses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Through artists mankind becomes an individual, in that they unite the past and the future in the present. They are the higher orga...n of the soul, where the life spirits of entire external mankind meet and in which inner mankind first acts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Lust is a mysterious wound in the side of humanity; or rather, at the very source of its life! To confound this lust in man with t...hat desire which unites the sexes is like confusing a tumor with the very organ which it devours, a tumor whose very deformity horribly reproduces the shape.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Scepticism, as I said, is not intellectual only; it is moral also; a chronic atrophy and disease of the whole soul. A man lives by... believing something; not by debating and arguing about many things. A sad case for him when all that he can manage to believe is something he can button in his pocket, and with one or the other organ eat and digest! Lower than that he will not get.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »