... laws haven't the slightest interest for me--except in the world of science, in which they are always changing; or in the world... of art, in which they are unchanging; or in the world of Being in which they are, for the most part, unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater and cinema, at least as to what is less intellectual and more... direct about them, forces us to admit that the delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, one might perhaps say a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good film. We seem to come away with a better conscience. In a certain sense it is as if for the man in the audience all theater is "Corneillian." From this point of view one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage, some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a certain tension which is a definite part of theater. No matter how slight this difference it undoubtedly exists, even between the worst charity production in the theater and the most brilliant of Olivier's film adaptations.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writer, like a swimmer caught by an undertow, is borne in an unexpected direction. He is carried to a subject which has awaite...d him--a subject sometimes no part of his conscious plan. Reality, the reality of sensation, has accumulated where it was least sought. To write is to be captured--captured by some experience to which one may have given hardly a thought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... not only have we exploited them physically and economically to bring ease to our bodies and our purses, but also we have explo...ited them emotionally to bring us many sublimated satisfactions. Our relationship with Negroes is a many-stringed instrument upon which we play melodies to replenish all the empty places in our hearts.... The parent-child relationship is almost consciously acted out, with the obedience, seeming respect, and acceptance by "our Nigras" going far toward soothing heartaches for the rebellion, arrogance, and rejection we must endure as our real children seize their own lives from us in adolescence. Even the reverse, the child-parent role, is sometimes filled, as we play the part of babyhood helplessness, satisfying immature longings to be waited on and taken care of.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the highest gifts are not measurable in dollars and cents. Beyond and above the class who run an account with the world and me...rely manage honestly to pay in kind for what they receive, there is a noble army--the Shakespeares and Miltons, the Newtons, Galileos and Darwins,--Watts, Morse, Howe, Lincoln, Garrison, John Brown--a part of the world's roll of honor--whose price of board and keep dwindles into nothingness when compared with what the world owes them; men who have taken of the world's bread and paid for it in immortal thoughts, invaluable inventions, new facilities, heroic deeds of loving self-sacrifice; men who dignify the world for their having lived in it and to whom the world will ever bow in grateful worship as its heroes and benefactors. It may not be ours to stamp our genius in enduring characters--but we can give what we are at its best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.... Any man's death diminishes me ...because I am involved in Mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Miss C_____ is ... remarkably neat in her person and is uncommonly diligent in every part of useful economy.... She hath indeed un...der her father's tuition acquired ... a large share of real learning of almost all the living and dead languages. Nor was the leisure which she found for such acquirements produced by neglecting anything necessary or useful for the family, but by the most assiduous industry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As this world is at present constituted, what we call the lower part of mankind work for pay, and by that means support themselves... and families; yet their assistance by the means of their labor is as necessary to the rich as the pay of the rich is to the laboring man. Did not this dependency for common subsistence oblige the lower class of men to sell their labor, if the gentleman whose birth and fortune had enabled him to have had a literate education was to despise his cook for his ignorance, the cook in my opinion would then have a very reasonable pretense for withdrawing his labor and forcing the learned insulter to employ some of that time in preparing food for his body which he (by the help of his cook) hath now leisure to employ in pampering the pride of his heart by first acquiring and then applauding his own acquired learning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The female part of the Cry (who had many of them often experienced a joyful self- approbation on being told by their admirers that... all their perfection lay in folly and that to prove their wisdom they must shun, as poison, every offered instruction for fear of becoming disagreeable to their lovers) now felt rolling in their bosoms the highest anger and disdain. Not against their adorers for so preposterous a method of flattery, much less against themselves for receiving and being pleased with such absurd adulation: but all their indignation was pointed against Portia for daring to bring into open light the true meaning of such paradoxical stuff.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »