Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisi...tion obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The university is no longer a quiet place to teach and do scholarly work at a measured pace and contemplate the universe. It is bi...g, complex, demanding, competitive, bureaucratic, and chronically short of money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under the spell of moonlight, music, flowers or the cut and smell of good tweeds, I sometimes feel the divine urge for an hour, a ...day or maybe a week. Then it is gone an my interest returns to corn pone and mustard greens, or rubbing a paragraph with a soft cloth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends no...ne, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Always this same morbid interest in other people and their doings, their privacies, their dirty linen, always this air of alertnes...s for personal happenings, personalities, personalities, personalities. Always this subtle criticism and appraisal of other people, this analysis of other people's motives. If anatomy presupposes a corpse, then psychology presupposes a world of corpses. Personalities, which means personal criticism and analysis, presuppose a whole world laboratory of human psyches waiting to be vivisected. If you cut a thing up, of course it will smell. Hence, nothing raises such an infernal stink, at last, as human psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How else is the famous short story 'A study in Abjection' to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently... undermined by psychology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport:... Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustfull beasts, that onely know to doe it:LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amount... of hard work is too severe for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is our life? a play of passion; Our mirth the music of division;... Our mothers' wombs the tiring-houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath, I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,... And speed glum heroes up the line to death,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »