For the universe has three children, born at one time, which reappear, under different names, in every system of thought, whether ...they be called cause, operation, and effect; or, more poetically, Jove, Pluto, Neptune; or, theologically, the Father, the Spirit, and the Son; but which we will call here, the Knower, the Doer, and the Sayer. These stand respectively for the love of truth, for the love of good, and for the love of beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confr...onted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Homer sweeps us away by the irresistible movement of lines through a whole passage to a splendid climax. What counts is the single...ness of his effect, the unbroken maintenance of a heroic or tragic mood, the concentration on some action vividly imagined and clearly portrayed without irrelevance or second thoughts or even those hints that lure into bypaths of fancy and suggest that there is more in the words than is obvious at first sight. But in Virgil, great though the paragraphs are, compelling though the climax is when it is reached, we are more concerned with the details, with each small effect and each deftly placed word, than with the whole. We linger over the richness of single phrases, over the "pathetic half-lines," over the precision or potency with which a word illuminates a sentence or a happy sequence of sounds imparts an inexplicable charm to something that might otherwise have been trivial. Of course, Homer has his magical phrases and Virgil his bold effects, but the distinction stands. It is a matter of composition, of art, and it marks the real difference between the two kinds of epic, which are not so much "authentic" and "literary" as oral and written.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most of the brain consists of "wires"; a single unit may have thousands of connections with other units and with itself. That is n...ot the case in a standard computer, where a chip usually has less than six connections. Moreover, neurons are much, much slower than the switching elements of the computer. It seems likely that the brain can accomplish its complex feats of perception and thought by means of millions of connections acting in parallel. The connections as a whole define the information content of the system. In this way a vast amount of knowledge can be brought to bear on a decision all at once. The brain seems to be able to perform as many as two hundred trillion operations in a second; not serially, but simultaneously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Books are the best things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to e...ffect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every... work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literary criticism can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing. C...riticism can never be a science: it is, in the first place, much too personal, and in the second, it is concerned with values that science ignores. The touchstone is emotion, not reason. We judge a work of art by its effect on our sincere and vital emotion, and nothing else. All the critical twiddle-twaddle about style and form, all this pseudoscientific classifying and analysing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion, is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I wonder where you got your statistics when you say that Theirs executed more people than did the Terreur? I object to this kind o...f excuse for two reasons. Although from a Christian's or a mathematician's point of view a thousand people killed in battle a hundred years ago equal a thousand people killed in a battle of today, historically the first definition is "slaughter" and the second "some casualties." Secondly: one cannot compare the slapdash suppression, however abominable, of a revolt with the thorough application of a system of murder.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one ...effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to "feel good" about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and... consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »