Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel ... will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but p...lace now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Men and women approaching retirement age should be recycled for public service work, and their companies should foot the bill. We ...can no longer afford to scrap-pile people.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, fr...om a passing shape, from a spider's web.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Duccio came not by usura nor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin' not by usura... nor was 'La Calunnia' painted. Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Praedis, Came no church of cut stone signed: Adamo me fecit.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it h...as--the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge--infinitely precious, time- resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.) ...I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: 'Omaha.'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out b...efore you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Far over the ice, between the hemlock woods and snow-clad hills, stands the pickerel-fisher.... He does not make the scenery less ...wild, more than the jays and the muskrats, but stands there as a part of it, as the natives are represented in the voyages of early navigators, at Nootka Sound, and on the Northwest coast, with their furs about them, before they were tempted to loquacity by a scrap of iron. He belongs to the natural family of man, and is planted deeper in nature and has more root than the inhabitants of towns.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Rest enough for the individual man. Too much and too soon and we call it death. But for Man no rest and no ending. He must go on, ...conquest beyond conquest. First, this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him. And at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning.... Little animals. And if we're no more than animals we must snatch each little scrap of happiness, and live and suffer and pass, mattering no more than all the other animals do or have done. It is this, or that. All the universe or nothing. Which shall it be, Passworthy? Which shall it be?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »