He had first discovered a propensity for savagery in the acrid lavatories of a minor English public school where he used to press ...the heads of the new boys into the ceramic bowl and pull the flush upon them to drown their gurgling protests.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The source of our actions resides in an unconscious propensity to regard ourselves as the center, the cause, and the conclusion of... time. Our reflexes and our pride transform into a planet the parcel of flesh and consciousness we are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man ...do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Battles, revolutions, pestilence, famine, and death, are never the effect of those natural causes, which we experience. Prodigies,... omens, oracles, judgments, quite obscure the few natural events, that are intermingled with them. But as the former grow thinner every page ... we soon learn, that there is nothing mysterious or supernatural in the case, but that all proceeds from the usual propensity of mankind towards the marvellous, and that, though this inclination may at intervals receive a check from sense and learning, it can never be thoroughly extirpated.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object, those qualit...ies, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental ca...re, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus I believe that without doing violence to the ancient doctrine of the Chinese, one can say that the Li has been brought by the... perfection of its nature to choose, from several possibilities, the most appropriate; and that by this means it has produced the Ki (Ch'i) or matter with dispositions such that all the rest has come about by natural propensities, in the same way that Monsieur Descartes claims to bring forth the present order of the world as a consequence of a small number of initially generated assumptions. Thus the Chinese, far from being blameworthy, merit praise for their ideas of things being created by their natural propensity and by a pre-established harmony.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »