Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectu...al deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type--the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence--is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You cannot have one well-bred man without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any high point. Especially women;Mit... requires a great many cultivated women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in order that you have one Madame de Staël.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Carlyle, a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetorician out of necessity, constantly aroused by the craving for a strong faith... as well as by the feeling of an incapacity for it (Min this respect a typical romantic!).... Fundamentally, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes it a point of honor not to be one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dat little man in black dar, he say women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wan't a woman! Whar did your Christ come... from? Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothin' to do wid Him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.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 average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of h...imself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset, the crimson colour of it should creep into his vote.... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A set of ideas, a point of view, a frame of reference is in space only an intersection, the state of affairs at some given moment ...in the consciousness of one man or many men, but in time it has evolving form, virtually organic extension. In time ideas can be thought of as sprouting, growing, maturing, bringing forth seed and dying like plants.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Waldo Lydecker: Laura considered me the wisest, the wittiest, the most interesting man she'd ever met. I was in complete accord wi...th her on that point.... She thought me also the kindest, the gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world. Detective Mark McPherson: Did you agree with her there, too? Waldo Lydecker: McPherson, you won't understand this, but I've tried to become the kindest, gentlest, the most sympathetic man in the world. Detective Mark McPherson: Have any luck? Waldo Lydecker: Let me put it this way: I shall be sincerely sorry to see my neighbor's children devoured by wolves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »