The trail of the serpent reaches into all the lucrative professions and practices of man. Each has its own wrongs. Each finds a te...nder and very intelligent conscience a disqualification for success. Each requires of the practitioner a certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a sequestration from the sentiments of generosity and love, a compromise of private opinion and lofty integrity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I believe that I am letting my kids see that a man can be tender, sensitive, warm, attentive to feelings, and present, just plain ...there. That's important to me, because I didn't get any of that from my own father, and I am realizing now how much I missed it.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 »
The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live ove...r the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, an...d does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's fatherliness is enriched as much by his acceptance of his feminine and childlike strivings as it is by his memories of ten...der closeness with his own father. A man who has been able to accept tenderness from his father is able later in life to be tender with his own children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the early nineteenth century, the doctrine of self-sufficiency came to apply to families as well as individuals.... The family ...became a special protected place, the repository of tender, pure, and generous feelings (embodied by the mother) and a bulwark and bastion against the raw, competitive, aggressive, and selfish world of commerce (embodied by the father).... In performing this protective task, the good family was to be as self-sufficient as the good man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Farewell? a long farewell to all my greatness. This is the state of man; today he puts forth... The tender leaves of hopes, tomorrow blossoms, And bears his blushing honors thick upon him: The third day comes a frost, a killing frost, And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root, And then he falls as I do.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »