In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it's no...t poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
An old man, sir, and his wits are not so blunt as, God help, I would desire they were; but, in faith, honest as the skin between h...is brows.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 »
Hell is out of fashion--institutional hells at any rate. The populated infernos of the 20th century are more private affairs, the ...gaps between the bars are the sutures of one's own skull.... A valid hell is one from which there is a possibility of redemption, even if this is never achieved, the dungeons of an architecture of grace whose spires point to some kind of heaven. The institutional hells of the present century are reached with one-way tickets, marked Nagasaki and Buchenwald, worlds of terminal horror even more final than the grave.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When one walks, one is brought into touch first of all with the essential relations between one's physical powers and the characte...r of the country; one is compelled to see it as its natives do. Then every man one meets is an individual. One is no longer regarded by the whole population as an unapproachable and uninteresting animal to be cheated and robbed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The differences between the two men were pronounced. Galileo was an urbane gentleman who loved wine (which he described as "light ...held together by moisture"), women (he had three children by his mistress, Marina Gamba), and song (he was an accomplished musician). Kepler sneezed when he drank wine, had little luck with women, and heard his music in the stars. The deep organ-tones of religiosity and mysticism that resounded through Kepler's work struck Galileo as anachronistic and more than a bit embarrassing. Kepler suspected as much and pled with Galileo to please "not hold against me my rambling and my free way of speaking about nature." Galileo never answered his letter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The history of art is almost three times longer than that of writing, and the relationship between the two types of expression can... be seen in the earliest forms of writing, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, very few people treat art as a system of communication which is historically linked with language. If more people were to take this view they would find that their approach to art would change. Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Genius sits in a glass house--but in an unbreakable one--conceiving ideas. After giving birth, it falls into madness. Stretches ou...t its hand through the window toward the first person happening by. The demon's claw rips, the iron fist grips. Before, you were a model, mocks the ironic voice between serrated teeth, for me, you are raw material to work on. I throw you against the glass wall, so that you remain stuck there, projected and stuck.... (Then come the lovers of art and contemplate the bleeding work from outside. Then come the photographers. "New art," it says in the newspaper the following day. The learned journals give it a name that ends in "ism.")LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If a sound justification for most scientific activity is going to be found, it will eventually come perhaps from a recognition tha...t man's sense of curiosity about the world and himself is every bit as compelling as his need for clothing and food.... Making sense of the world and one's place in that world has roots deep within the human psyche.... We can drop the dangerous pretense that science is legitimate only in so far as it contributes to our material well-being or to our store of perennial truths. Viewed in this light, the repudiation of theoretical scientific inquiry is tantamount to a denial of what may be our most characteristically human trait.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But how do we recognize ourselves? How can man know himself? He is a dark and hidden thing; whereas the hare is said to have seven... skins, man can take off seven times seventy skins and still not be able to say: "That is you as you really are, that is no longer mere appearance." Besides, it is a painful and dangerous undertaking to dig down into oneself in this way and to descend violently and directly into the shaft of one's being. How easily he could injure himself doing this, so that no doctor could cure him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »