To anyone who still feels that there must be an identity of logical form between language and reality, I can only plead that the c...onception of language as a mirror of reality is radically mistaken. We find out soon enough that the universe is not capricious: the child who learns that fire burns and knife-edges cut knows that there are inexorable limits set upon his desires. Language must conform to the discovered regularities and irregularities of experience. But in order to do so, it is enough that it should be apt for the expression of everything that is or might be the case. To be content with less would be to be satisfied to be inarticulate; to ask for more is to desire the impossible. No roads lead from grammar to metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So you finally got wise to yourself, did you? Funny thing about you women. Most of you don't get wise soon enough. You wait until ...you're so old nobody want you.... You're not so hard to look at. Give yourself a tumble, you'll make the grade.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect know...ledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Ãâ schylus, nor Virgil even,--works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Poor little men, poor little cocks! As soon as they're old enough, they swell their plumage to be conquerors.... If they only knew... that it's enough to be just a little bit wounded and sad in order to obtain everything without fighting for it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And though that other question that I asked and can't Remember any more is going to move still farther upward, casting... Its shadow enormously over where I remain, I can't see it. Enough to know that I shall have answered for myself soon, Be led away for further questioning and later returned To the amazingly quiet room in which all my life has been spent.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The interest in Wisdom is fading. Soon there will not be enough left to support the aphorism, even though it tries to amuse by hal...f-mocking the Wisdom it propounds.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »