The tourist is first of all an adventurer. The dream is of the pioneer, the explorer, the great voyager or the conquering emperor.... He leaves the security of home far behind and sets out beyond the perimeters of the known world for fame, fortune and excitement. He wants to take on the minotaur, scale the Matterhorn, discover a lost Amazonian tribe or sample the delights of a Thai brothel.... The essence of the tourist adventure is exhibited in the contours of the excitements that it provides. And these contours are best inferred from the stories that are told and re-told with animation to relatives, friends and colleagues at home. It is virtually never what has been seen that is recounted with enthusiasm. When the sites are described it is in the form of ritualized cliches: the Eiffel Tower really is a wonder--we went up it, and you get such a nice view. It is rather the personal moments of the tour, moments of near-crisis, that in retrospect were exciting: when one of the suitcases failed to arrive off the luggage chute at Frankfort Airport. Touring itself has been turned into a routine, restricting adventure to those moments when routine breaks down.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all--no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it ...sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself--a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Through spontaneity we are re-formed into ourselves. It creates an explosion that for the moment frees us from handed- down frames... of reference, memory choked with old facts and information and undigested theories and techniques of other people's findings. Spontaneity is the moment of personal freedom when we are faced with reality, and see it, explore it and act accordingly. In this reality the bits and pieces of ourselves function as an organic whole. It is the time of discovery, of experiencing, of creative expression.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The differences between the President and the Prime Minister were at least in one respect something more than the obvious differen...ces of national character, education, and even temperament. For all his sense of history, his large, untroubled, easy-going style of life, his unshakable feeling of personal security, his natural assumption of being at home in the great world far beyond the confines of his own country, Roosevelt was a typical child of the twentieth century and of the New World; while Churchill for all his love of the present hour, his unquenchable appetite for new knowledge, his sense of the technological possibilities of our time, and the restless roaming of his fancy in considering how they might be most imaginatively applied, despite his enthusiasm for Basic English, or the siren suit which so upset his hosts in Moscow--despite all this, Churchill remains a European of the nineteenth century.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The personal things should be left out of platforms at conventions .... You can argue yourself blue in the face, and you're not go...ing to change each other's minds. It's a waste of your time and my time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is one of the most serious intrusions into personal life that I can think of, and it's as bad as anything I've ever experienc...ed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Two kinds of symbol must surely be distinguished. The algebraic symbol comes naked into the world of mathematics and is clothed wi...th value by its masters. A poetic symbol--like the Rose, for Love, in Guillaume de Lorris--comes trailing clouds of glory from the real world, clouds whose shape and colour largely determine and explain its poetic use. In an equation, x and y will do as well as a and b; but the Romance of the Rose could not, without loss, be re-written as the Romance of the Onion, and if a man did not see why, we could only send him back to the real world to study roses, onions, and love, all of them still untouched by poetry, still raw.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »