The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effec...t of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The fact alone that both, like Chatham before them, were great war ministers, links their names inseparably. Beyond that, they sha...red many qualities in common: unquenchable vitality, restless energy, personal magnetism, and an inspiring power of oratory. They were alike also in their defects: opportunism, total lack of consideration for others, and a degree of egotism that can only be termed infantile. Lloyd George, however, whom Lord Haldane once called "an illiterate with an unbalanced mind," lacked both the versatility and the intellectual power of Churchill. Where Sir Winston found relaxation in Macauley or Gibbon, Lloyd George in his prime amused himself with cheap detective fiction. The latter, cast in an inferior mold, lacked also the personal courage of his younger colleague and successor.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning... Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The death of John Barrymore made us think again for a minute of F. Scott Fitzgerald. They were very different men: a lot alike. Un...doubtedly, they both worked hard, but there was the same sense of a difficult technique easily mastered (too easily perhaps); there was the same legend of great physical magnetism, working incessantly for its own destruction; there was the same need for public confession, either desperate or sardonic; and there was always a good deal of time wasted, usually accompanied by the sweet smell of grapes. We have seen Scott Fitzgerald when everything he said was a childish parody of his own talent, and the last time we saw John Barrymore he was busy with a sick and humiliating parody of his. The similarity probably ends there. Up to the day he died, we believe, Fitzgerald still kept his original and eager devotion to his profession, along, we like to think, with the strict confidence that he might still achieve the strict perfection that was so often almost his. Barrymore, on the other hand, had given up long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come toge...ther on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sometime after the Enlightenment, science and religion came to a gentleman's agreement. Science was for the real world: machines, ...manufactured things, medicines, guns, moon rockets. Religion was for everything else, the immeasurable: morals, sacraments, poetry, insanity, death, and some residual forms of politics and statesmanship. Religion became, in both senses of the word, immaterial. Science and religion were apples and or anges. So the pact said: render unto apples the things that are Caesar's, and unto oranges the things that are God's. Just as the Maya kept two calendars, one profane and one priestly, so Western science and religion fell into two different conceptions of the universe, two different vocabularies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A mutual and satisfied sexual act is of great benefit to the average woman, the magnetism of it is health giving. When it is not d...esired on the part of the woman and she gives no response, it should not take place. The submission of her body without love or desire is degrading to the woman's finer sensibility, all the marriage certificates on earth to the contrary notwithstanding.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We have read that on some exposed place in the city of Geneva, they have fixed a brazen indicator for the use of travelers, with t...he names of the mountain summits in the horizon marked upon it.... It stands there a piece of mute brass, that seems nevertheless to know in what vicinity it is: and there perchance it will stand, when the nation that placed it there has passed away, still in sympathy with the mountains, forever discriminating in the desert. So, we may say, stands this man, pointing as long as he lives, in obedience to some spiritual magnetism, to the summits in the historical horizon, for the guidance of his fellows.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly trans...lated; its literal monument alone remains.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not ind...ifferent to us which way we walk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »