I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject mat...ter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense? No doubt the number of people cr...ass enough to reply exclusively on the former and scorn the latter are sufficient in themselves to explain the disfavor into which everything deriving from the senses has gradually fallen. But when the most scholarly of men have taught me that light is a vibration, or offered me any other fruits of their labors of reasoning, they will not have rendered me an account of what is important to me about light, of what my eyes have begun to teach me about it, of what makes me different from a blind man--things which are the stuff of miracles, not subject matter for reasoning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our discussion will be adequate; if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of; for precision is not to be sought fo...r alike in all discussions, and more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation.... We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premises, to indicate the truth roughly and in outline.... In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of theater from the medieval period until the nineteenth century has been in large part a history of further and furth...er separations of the scene of dramatic action from the physical situation of the audience. Even as the subject matter--in the plays of Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg--became more and more continuous with the life of the audience, the stage itself pulled in its apron, emphasized its proscenium, and became a room with an invisible fourth wall, allowing the audience to look in, while keeping it more definitely outside. The progress of film was the reverse. From the stylized and theatrical settings of the early dramas, silent films moved into greater and greater involvement with the actors. Previously the audience saw actors from a distance, with a sense of tableau and formal separation. Although they seemed to be like us, they were not: silent, hieratic, caught in frightened frenzies of comedy, tragedy, and melodrama.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Logic is not concerned with human behavior in the same sense that physiology, psychology, and social sciences are concerned with i...t. These sciences formulate laws or universal statements which have as their subject matter human activities as processes in time. Logic, on the contrary, is concerned with relations between factual sentences (or thoughts). If logic ever discusses the truth of factual sentences it does so only conditionally, somewhat as follows: if such-and-such a sentence is true, then such-and-such another sentence is true. Logic itself does not decide whether the first sentence is true, but surrenders that question to one or the other of the empirical sciences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this i...nterest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Experiences in order to be educative must lead out into an expanding world of subject matter, a subject matter of facts or informa...tion and of ideas. This condition is satisfied only as the educator views teaching and learning as a continuous process of reconstruction of experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the wombs of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious abo...ut paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perha...ps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter..., but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »