Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not becom...e picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In strict science, all persons underlie the same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by mining for... the metaphysical foundation of this elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some punishment seems preparing for a people who are ungratefully abusing the best constitution and the best King any nation was e...ver blessed with, intent on nothing but luxury, licentiousness, power, places, pensions, and plunder; while the ministry, divided in their counsels, with little regard for each other, worried by perpetual oppositions, in continual apprehension of changes, intent on securing popularity in case they should lose favor, have for some years past had little time or inclination to attend to our small affairs, whose remoteness makes them appear even smaller.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Because of the unusual remoteness of Russia, and because of nostalgia's remaining throughout one's life an insane companion, with ...whose heartrending oddities one is accustomed to put up in public, I feel no embarrassment in confessing to the sentimental stab of attachment to my first book.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I start thinking of my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love--from my heart, from th...e tender nucleus of a personal matter--to monstrously remote points of the universe. Something impels me to measure the consciousness of my love against such unimaginable and incalculable things as the behavior of nebulae (whose very remoteness sees a form of insanity), the dreadful pitfalls of eternity, the unknowledgeable beyond the unknown, the helplessness, the cold, the sickening involutions and interpenetrations of space and time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What a fine communication from age to age, of the fairest and noblest thoughts, the aspirations of ancient men, even such as were ...never communicated by speech, is music!... A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the Vedas, and I associate with it the idea of infinite remoteness, as well as of beauty and serenity, for to the senses that is farthest from us which addresses the greatest depth within us. It teaches us again and again to trust the remotest and finest as the divinest instinct, and makes a dream our only real experience. We feel a sad cheer when we hear it, perchance because we that hear are not one with that which is heard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an i...deal remoteness and perfection.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass a...t such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »