Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of "style." But while style--deriving from... the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets--suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thoth, Hermes, the stylus, the palette, the pen, the quill endure,... though our books are a floor of smouldering ash under our feet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although then a printer by trade, he listed himself in this early directory as an antiquarian. When he was asked the reason for th...is he replied that he always thought every town should have at least one antiquarian, and since none appeared for the post, he volunteered.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The body Of... Benjamin Franklin Printer (Like the cover of an old book Its contents torn out And stripped of its lettering and gilding) Lies here, food for worms. But the work shall not be lost For it will (as he believed) appear once more In a new and more elegant edition Revised and corrected by The Author.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And so on into winter Till even I have ceased... To come as a foot printer, And only some slight beast So mousy or so foxy Shall print there as my proxy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Printer, philosopher, scientist, author and patriot, impeccable husband and citizen, why isn't he an archetype? Pioneers, Oh Pione...ers! Benjamin was one of the greatest pioneers of the United States. Yet we just can't do with him. What's wrong with him then? Or what's wrong with us?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What strikes one about the Autobiography is its complete lack of sentimentality. Franklin had a pronounced character which he pres...ented very acutely, but he did not think of himself as primarily a unique inner self. He was all his many roles, although he put the first above all others, as he wrote in his testament: "I, Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, printer, late Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the court of France, now President of Pennsylvania." There is much pride of achievement in this, but no vanity at all. It is also a wholly social ego.... The distance between Franklin and Hawthorne is immense. Franklin was the sum of his actions, while Hawthorne and we have romantic egos that cannot bear the notion that one's manner of acting one's roles measures true character. For Hawthorne there was a private self that was one's true, supreme, and most honest part. That is why he thought it important to take the "private and domestic view of public men," and why the discrepancy between the two made him so bitter. For Franklin the domestic self was one among several. No remnants of an immortal soul bothered him, and he needed no replacement for it. His private affections were not politically relevant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now William pulled the lever down, And click-clack went the printing-press.... William was the only printer in town Who had peeped while the angels undress.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-...fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who cares what a man's style is, so it is intelligible,--as intelligible as his thought. Literally and really, the style is no mor...e than the stylus, the pen he writes with; and it is not worth scraping and polishing, and gilding, unless it will write his thoughts the better for it. It is something for use, and not to look at. The question for us is, not whether Pope had a fine style, wrote with a peacock's feather, but whether he uttered useful thoughts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »