A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, ...thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business o...f the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When men were all asleep the snow came flying, In large white flakes falling on the city brown,... Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying, Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Show me a man who lives alone and has a perpetually clean kitchen, and 8 times out of 9 I'll show you a man with detestable spirit...ual qualities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a... nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of s...cience has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very quee...r world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refres...hed, ready to draw from the same storehouse--always open, always full, always abundant--new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes ... it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul--its gaiety or its sadness.... As with our perishable flesh ... talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »