In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensati...ons are the items of consciousness--a color, a weight, a texture--that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake and Goethe were individualists par excellence, uncompromisingly protective of their single vision. In both Faust Part II and... The Four Zoas, emphasis on the universality of the poet's message contrasts with the resistant texture of a compressed style and the striking complexity of the mythological machinery. Blake likes to emphasize that he is not writing for the simple-minded; Goethe takes a teasing pleasure in keeping philologists busy. Faust and The Four Zoas are dramatic epics of Humanity, but embodied in a mythic language whose uniqueness and quirkiness are jealously guarded. Blake never published The Four Zoas, though it culminates his early prophecies and provides the indispensable key to the later ones. And Goethe refused to allow Faust Part II to be printed in its entirety until after his death. Both poets postponed the public's discovery of their central works; secrecy was enforced as long as it could be.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligenc...e with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The laying of fish on the embers, the taste of the fish,... the feel of the texture of bread, the round and the half-loaf, the grain of a petal, the rain-bow and the rain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the... mobs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough ...fibre of the human heart. The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the world, ...which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American... life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools--no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot! Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy?... There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine Unweave a rainbow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is not a piece of fine feminine Spitalfields silk--but is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' ca...bles & hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book--on risk of a lumbago & sciatics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »