If you have wit, use it to please, and not to hurt; you may shine, like the sun in the temperature zones, without scorching. Here ...it is wished for; under the Line it is dreaded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Did you know, Putnam, that more murders are committed at 92 Fahrenheit than any other temperature? I read an article once. Lower t...emperatures, people are easygoing. Over 92, it's too hot to move. But just 92, people get irritable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The darkened theatre; a soft, comfortable seat; controlled temperature and humidity; and thousands of shadowy images moving across... the screen--these strongly suggest the dream world each of us occupies while sleeping. It is possible to think of cinema as the deliberate manufacture of dreams. Psychological experiments reveal that individuals deprived of dreams--allowed to sleep but awakened when they begin to dream--move into a psychotic state. Clearly, dreaming is a biological and cultural necessity. In some way, our human psychobiological equipment is purged and regenerated while we sleep. Sanity is maintained, it seems, by the curious, illogical flow of images we call dreams. But why do we require dreams during the waking state?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Boston is not a small New York, as they say a child is not a small adult but is, rather, a specially organized small creature with... its small-creature's temperature, balance, and distribution of fat. In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality. The cows come home; the chickens go to roost; the meadow is dark. Nearly every Bostonian is in his house or in someone else's house, dining at the home board, enjoying domestic and social privacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and... security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Six months at most after they get here, these young people--and they are mostly young who come--have lost every idea they had, exc...ept flirtation and temperature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Aesthetically at odds, these two genres of mass humor form a Janus face of American culture. Stand-up is a surviving bastion of in...dividual expression. The comedian confronts the audience with his or her personality and wins celebration--the highest form of acceptance--or is scorned and rebuffed as a pitiable outsider. The heckler, the mood of the audience, or the temperature of the room cannot always be handled through quality control. Even when presented electronically, the jokes of a stand-up monologue cannot be underlined by canned laughter without the manipulation thoroughly exposing itself.... The sitcom, by contrast, is the technology of the assembly-line brought to art. Even when live audiences are used, their reactions are "sweetened" with carefully calculated titters, chortles, and guffaws. Large sums of investment capital must be assembled to produce a sitcom; all factors must be controlled by recognized experts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When an idea is just rising on the horizon, the soul's temperature with respect to it is usually very cold. Only gradually does th...e idea develop its warmth, and it is hottest (which is to say, exerting its greatest influence) when belief in the idea is already once again in decline.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Dark times" is what they call it in Norway when the sun remains below the horizon all day long: the temperature falls slowly but ...surely at such times.--A nice metaphor for all those thinkers for whom the sun of mankind's future has temporarily disappeared.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having no strea...m passing through it to melt or wear away the ice.... It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days' duration in March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »