Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense? No doubt the number of people cr...ass enough to reply exclusively on the former and scorn the latter are sufficient in themselves to explain the disfavor into which everything deriving from the senses has gradually fallen. But when the most scholarly of men have taught me that light is a vibration, or offered me any other fruits of their labors of reasoning, they will not have rendered me an account of what is important to me about light, of what my eyes have begun to teach me about it, of what makes me different from a blind man--things which are the stuff of miracles, not subject matter for reasoning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The door is opening. A man you have never seen enters the room. He tells you that it is time to go, but that you may stay, ... />If you wish. You reply that it is one and the same to you. It was only later, after the house had materialized elsewhere, That you remembered you forgot to ask him what form the change would take.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpa...ble, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is the disease which manifests itself in an inability to leave a party--any party at all--until it is all over and the lights... are being put out?... I suppose that part of this mania for staying is due to a fear that, if I go, something good will happen and I'll miss it. Somebody might do card tricks, or shoot somebody else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What then is the difference between film and theatre? Or should one not rather ask: what are the differences? Let us be content wi...th the reply that the screen has two dimensions and the stage three, that the screen presents photographs and the stage living actors. All the subtler differences stem from these. The camera can show us all sorts of things--from close-ups of insects to panoramas of prairies--which the stage cannot even suggest, and it can move from one to another with much more dexterity than any conceivable stage. The stage, on the other hand, can be revealed in the unsurpassable beauty of three-dimensional shapes, and the stage actor establishes between himself and his audience a contact real as electricity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but ...women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I'd decline. "Just keep my liver and lungs in good... working order," I'd reply, "so I can go on drinking and smoking!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have a notion that gamblers are as happy as most people, being always excited; women, wine, fame, the table, even ambition, sate... now & then, but every turn of the card & cast of the dice keeps the gambler alive--besides one can game ten times longer than one can do any thing else.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »