What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed, ...and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Learn what is true, in order to do what is right," is the summing up of the whole duty of man, for all who are unable to satisfy ...their mental hunger with the east wind of authority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to d...esire.... She [Leonardo's Mona Lisa] is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern thought has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Celt is quarrelsome; he prides himself that with him it is a word and a blow. He broods upon the memory of ancient wrongs in a... way that to the Englishman is incomprehensible; if the English were Irish by temperament they would still be roused to fury by the name of the Battle of Hastings, instead of summing it up philosophically as "1066 and all that."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Coincidence may be described as the chance encounter of two unrelated causal chains which--miraculously, it seems--merge into a si...gnificant event. It provides the neatest paradigm of the bisociation of previously separate contexts, engineered by fate. Coincidences are puns of destiny. In the pun, two strings of thought are tangled into one acoustic knot; in the coincidental happening, two strings of events are knitted together by invisible hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men p...etty and vindictive.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The common idea that success spoils people by making them vain, egotistic, and self- complacent is erroneous; on the contrary, it ...makes them, for the most part, humble, tolerant, and kind. Failure makes people cruel and bitter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »