A tragic poet will never think of grouping around the chief character in his play secondary characters to serve as simplified copi...es, so to speak, of the former. The hero of a tragedy represents an individuality unique of its kind. It may be possible to imitate him, but then we shall be passing, whether consciously or not, from the tragic to the comic. No one is like him, because he is like no one. But a remarkable instinct, on the contrary, impels the comic poet, once he has elaborated his central character, to cause other characters, displaying the same general traits, to revolve as satellites round him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There... they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the body reacts in a purposeful way to wounds or infections or an abnormal way of living, so the psychic functions react t...o unnatural or injurious disturbances with appropriate means of defence. One of these purposeful reactions is the dream, in which the unconscious material constellated round a given conscious position is presented to the conscious mind in symbolic form. In this unconscious material are all those associations which have remained in the unconscious because they were only weakly emphasized but which nevertheless have sufficient energy to make themselves felt during sleep. Naturally the purposeful character of the dream-content cannot be directly seen from the manifest dream-content; it requires an analysis of this manifest content to reach the actual compensatory factors of the latent dream-content. But most physical defensive reactions are of the same scarcely recognizable and, so to speak, indirect nature, and their purposeful character also has only been recognized through deep investigation and exact observation. I might recall, for instance, the meaning of fever and the processes of suppuration in an infected wound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The original character, essentially such, is like a revolving Drummond light, raying away from itself all round it--everything is ...lit by it, everything starts up to it (mark how it is with Hamlet), so that, in certain minds, there follows upon the adequate conception of such a character, an effect, in its way, akin to that which in Genesis attends upon the beginning of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have you not budged an inch, then? Such is the daily news. Its facts appear to float in the atmosphere.... We should wash ourselve...s clean of such news. Of what consequence, though our planet explode, if there is no character involved in the explosion? In health we have not the least curiosity about such events. We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched upla...nds; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. I see far inland the banks which the stream anciently washed, before science began to record its freshets. Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts,--from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb,--heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festal board,--may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, on...ly seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
New England likes to think it has a civilization based on character. The South likes to think it has a character based on civiliza...tion. A big difference.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »