To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encou...nters only too rarely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that Mirabeau took to highway robbery "to ascertain what degree of resolution was necessary in order to place one's sel...f in formal opposition to the most sacred laws of society."... This was manly, as the world goes; and yet it was idle, if not desperate. A saner man would have found himself often enough "in formal opposition" to what are deemed "the most sacred laws of society," through obedience to yet more sacred laws, and so have tested his resolution without going out of his way. It is not for a man to put himself in such an attitude to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he find himself through obedience to the laws of his being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government, if he should chance to meet with such.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails lea...ving one's ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one's life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one's "real" life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It would be ... better to be judged by one's superiors than by one's peers. ...In a trial before his superiors, any criminal would... stand a chance of justice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have had, and may have still, a thousand friends, as they are called, in life, who are like one's partners in the waltz of this ...world--not much remembered when the ball is over.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »