Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor? No, the world must be peopl...ed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man may appear learned, without talking Sentences; as in his ordinary Gesture he discovers he can Dance, tho' he does not cut Ca...pers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson was the greater artist. His essays contain some of the most beautiful language in our literature. How Henry James could ha...ve thought he had never developed a "style" is to me one of the mysteries of criticism. Thoreau in Walden comes close to the master, but he falls behind in the homeliness of his details and in the occasional smugness of his social satire. It almost seems as if he were reacting against the chiseled beauty of Emerson's prose. The latter's sentences were so fine that he needed nothing else. They became, like marble statues, part of the garden that was Concord. Their composer, serene, calm, detached, bland in speech and manner, the soft-spoken philosopher revered by all, did not often trouble himself on his strolls in the woods and along the river to pluck the flowers or feed squirrels or even identify the different species of flora and fauna. As Thoreau observed, he wouldn't have been willing to trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets of Concord because it would have seemed out of character. Emerson communed with nature on a spiritual level, using his eyes to take in the landscape and his lungs the fresh air. He had no needs to brace himself with cold or rain or spend the night under the stars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration or a...r />metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the Store closet it would be charming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are all aware that speech, like chemistry, has a structure. There is a limited set of elements--vowels and consonants--and thes...e are combined to produce words which, in turn, compound into sentences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with i...t. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »