The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded th...eir crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Clear and diminished like a scene cut in cameo The lighthouse, and the boat on the beach, and the two shapes... Of the woman and the man;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Has it ever occurred to you that friendship, at best, is a rather doubtful asset? I don't want friends. I shall have worshippers a...nd followers. People who will obey me because they recognize my greatness. Those who are loyal will be rewarded, and the others--destroyed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is the shape of the tree, And the flower and the leaf, and the three pale beautiful pilgrims:... This is what you are to me.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have ever watched an artist constructing with bits of cold stone a beautiful living picture you know that he works faithful...ly and carefully on the pattern from the wrong side and while he is working every inequality, every tint a little too dull is apparent to him as his picture grows, but he works on and on. And even when he finishes at last and looks down at the completed pattern he is not discouraged to see here a little crevice and there a little roughness, an open seam here, a tiny patch there where the bit of marble was too small. Now he pours his cement over it and smoothes [sic] it into every seam, and with faith puts his work to dry. Next day the pattern is turned and the perfect whole is given to view, needing only the polishing of a loving hand to make it ready to slip in place. So we should work faithfully on our pattern, cement it together with ourselves, and polish it with human kindness; and lo! the work slips into place seemingly a perfect whole.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced ...to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ensnared in his starvation, Chaplin-man is always just below political awareness. A strike is a catastrophe for him because it thr...eatens a man truly blinded by his hunger; this man achieves an awareness of the working-class condition only when the poor man and the proletarian coincide under the gaze (and the blows) of the police.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more... easily he will triumph over it. For him it is not a question of copying, but of interpreting in a simpler and more luminous language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »