My criticisms are always simple; they are limited to one word:MOmit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and eve...ry page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak words and useless pages I have written; but the law is sound, and every book written without a superfluous page or word is a masterpiece. All the same, no one cares to apply so stern a law to another person. One has right to be severe only with oneself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The whole fauna of human fantasies, their marine vegetation, drifts and luxuriates in the dimly lit zones of human activity, as th...ough plaiting thick tresses of darkness. Here, too, appear the lighthouses of the mind, with their outward resemblance to less pure symbols. The gateway to mystery swings open at the touch of human weakness and we have entered the realms of darkness. One false step, one slurred syllable together reveal a man's thoughts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Brain is just the weight of God-- For--Heft them--Pound for Pound--... And they will differ--if they do-- As Syllable from Sound--LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and m...any an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For, whom the Muses smile upon, And touch with soft persuasion,... His words like a storm-wind can bring Terror and beauty on their wing; In his every syllable Lurketh nature veritable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings ...of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gowns, and pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget thi...s, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every year.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He began therefore to invest the fortress of my heart by a circumvallation of distant bows and respectful looks; he then entrenche...d his forces in the deep caution of never uttering an unguarded word or syllable. His designs being yet covered, he played off from several quarters a large battery of compliments. But here he found a repulse from the enemy by an absolute rejection of such fulsome praise, and this forced him back again close into his former trenches.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now you know very well that there are no less than fifty-eight different pieces in a violin. These pieces are strangers to each ot...her, and it takes a century, more or less, to make them thoroughly acquainted. At last they learn to vibrate in harmony, and the instrument becomes an organic whole, as if it were a great seed-capsule which had grown from a garden-bed in Cremona, or elsewhere. Besides, the wood is juicy and full of sap for fifty years or so, but at the end of fifty or hundred years gets tolerably dry and comparatively resonant. Don't you see that all this is just as true of a poem? Counting each word as a piece, there are more pieces in an average copy of verses than in a violin. The poet has forced all these words together, and fastened them, and they don't understand it at first. But let the poem be repeated aloud and murmured over in the mind's muffled whisper often enough, and at length the parts become knit together in such absolute solidarity that you could not change a syllable without the whole world's crying out against you for meddling with the harmonious fabric. Observe, too, how the drying process takes place in the stuff of a poem just as in that of a violin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »