...I never drink wine ... I keep my hands soft and supple ... I sleep in a soft bed and never over-tire my body. It is because whe...n my hour strikes I must be a perfect instrument. My eyes must be steady, my brain clear, my nerves calm, my aim true. I must be prepared to do my work, successfully if God wills. But if I perish, I perish.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farmers in overalls and wide-brimmed straw hats lounge about the store on hot summer days, when the most common sound is the thump...-thump-thump of a hound's leg on the floor as he scratches contentedly. Oldtime hunters say that fleas are a hound's salvation: his constant twisting and clawing in pursuit of the tormentors keeps his joints supple.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hand...s, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhym...e, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The real American type can never be a ballet dancer. The legs are too long, the body too supple and the spirit too free for this s...chool of affected grace and toe walking.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Is it the breath, merely, of the performer on a wind- instrument, or the skillful, supple fingers of the performer on a stringed i...nstrument which evoke those tones which lay upon us a spell of such power, and awaken that inexpressible feeling, akin to nothing else on earth--the sense of a distant spirit world, and of our own higher life in it? Is it not, rather, the mind, the soul, the heart, which merely employ those bodily organs to give forth into our external life what we feel in our inner depths?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason is a supple nymph, and slippery as a fish by nature. She had as leave give her kiss to an absurdity any day, as to syllogis...tic truth. The absurdity may turn out truer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a logic of language and a logic of mathematics. The former is supple and lifelike, it follows our experience. The latter ...is abstract and rigid, more ideal. The latter is perfectly necessary, perfectly reliable: the former is only sometimes reliable and hardly ever systematic. But the logic of mathematics achieves necessity at the expense of living truth, it is less real than the other, although more certain. It achieves certainty by a flight from the concrete into abstraction. Doubtless, to an idealist, this would seem to be a more perfect reality. I am not an idealist. The logic of the poet--that is, the logic of language or the experience itself--develops the way a living organism grows: it spreads out towards what it loves, and is heliotropic, like a plant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple. There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;... And God will grow no talons at his heels, Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »