What a strange thing is the propagation of life! A bubble of seed which may be spilt in a whore's lap, or in the orgasm of a volup...tuous dream, might (for aught we know) have formed a Caesar or a Buonaparte--there is nothing remarkable recorded of their sires, that I know of.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 »
It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that r...eligious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us make no mistake about it, this propagation was never one of her laws, nothing she ever demanded of us, but at the very most... something she tolerated; I have told you so. Why! what difference would it make to her were the race of men entirely to be extinguished upon earth, annihilated! she laughs at our pride when we persuade ourselves all would be over and done with were this misfortune to occur!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »