The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity ...must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us love our God supremely, Let us love each other, too;... Let us love and pray for sinners, Till our God makes all things new.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I grew up confidently expecting to have a profession and earn my own living, and also confidently expecting to be married and have... children. It was fifty-fifty with me. I was just as passionately determined to have children as I was to have a career. And my mother was the triumphant answer to all doubts as to the success of this double role. From my earliest memory she had more than half supported the family and yet she was supremely a mother.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The principles of the good society call for a concern with an order of being--which cannot be proved existentially to the sense or...gans--where it matters supremely that the human person is inviolable, that reason shall regulate the will, that truth shall prevail over error.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Translation is the paradigm, the exemplar of all writing.... It is translation that demonstrates most vividly the yearning for tra...nsformation that underlies every act involving speech, that supremely human gift.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Of all my Russian books, The Defense contains and diffuses the greatest "warmth"Mwhich may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract ...chess is supposed to be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[Micawber] is not only the greatest of Dickens' comic figures, but, with the one exception of Falstaff, he is the greatest comic f...igure in the whole range of English literature, a literature supremely rich in such characters. Falstaff is greater because he is himself a comic genius; in him the two familiar types of characters, the comic rogue and the comic butt, are combined, for he is a comic rogue who is his own butt, and as such he is unique. To this must be added his extraordinary versatility, the teeming abundance of his wit and humour, ranging from crude horse-play to a kind of comic philosophy, which is only displayed within a comparatively small compass ... but makes him tower over every other comic character. Micawber must be included in quite another category, namely, that of the great solemn fools, who do not offer us their wit and humour but only themselves, who do not make jokes but are themselves one endless joke. If Micawber--and all the persons of his kind (and most of us have known a few)Mshould realise even for a moment that he is funny, he would be ruined for us; but happily he does not, and while we are actually in his presence--and what a presence--we too must be as solemn as he is, the greatest of all the great solemn fools.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It shrinks my liver, doesn't it? It pickles my kidneys. Yeah. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so ...the balloon can soar. Suddenly, I'm above the ordinary. I'm competent, supremely competent. I'm walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I'm one of the great ones. I'm Michelangelo molding the beard of Moses. I'm Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I'm Horowitz playing the "Emperor Concerto." I'm John Barrymore, before the movies got him by the throat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be... learned from beholding this action."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »