These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is becau...se, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and, in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Summer involves going down as a steep flight of steps To a narrow ledge over the water. Is this it, then,... This iron comfort, these reasonable taboos, Or did you mean it when you stopped? And the face Resembles yours, the one reflected in the water.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependency in t...heir old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man's house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On a huge hill, Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and he that will... Reach her, about must, and about must go; And what the hill's suddenness resists, win so; Yet strive so, that before age, death's twilight, Thy Soul rest, for none can work in that night. To will, implies delay, therefore now do: Hard deeds, the body's pains; hard knowledge too The mind's endeavours reach, and mysteries Are like the Sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Byron's revealing line, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'Tis that I may not weep," suggests that the comic sense is parasitic...al upon the tragic. In order to avoid our tragic encounters with the transitoriness of passing fact, the fading of beauty, the destructive consequences of moral evil, alienation from the primary source of value, we make fun. The making of fun where no real occasion for fun exists is essentially what comedy is about. Tragedy and comedy are, indeed, but two masks worn by the same character alternately, depending on the exigencies of the moment; that is, depending upon which mask best represents him in such a way as successfully to reduce the unacceptable tensions of his ambience. Thus the obvious truth of Socrates' argument at the end of the Symposium. Both tragedy and comedy are but one-sided expressions of the ironic sensibility.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[I] am now struggling to enter the portals of the profession in which is locked up the passport which is to conduct me to all that... I am destined to receive in life. The entrance is steep and difficult, but my chiefest obstacles are within myself. If I knew and could master myself, all other difficulties would vanish. To overcome long-settled habits, one has almost to change "the stamp of nature"; but bad habits must be changed and good ones formed in their stead, or I shall never find the pearls I seek.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, no...t the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where, or rather which exists, and we can perfectly well say where, namely in the error of a one-sided, empty, ratiocination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on... the cuckoo clock style of architecture.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »