There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematic...s of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shams, or psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough gather beauty, music, picture, poetry. Was never stoicism so stern and exigent as this shall be. It shall send man home to his central solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know that much of the time he must have himself to his friend. He shall expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was so hard to pry this door open, and if I mess up I know the people behind me are going to have it that much harder. Because ...then there's living proof. They can sit around and say, "See? It doesn't work." I don't want to be their living proof.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have come to believe ... that the stage may do more than teach, that much of our current moral instruction will not endure the t...est of being cast into a lifelike mold, and when presented in dramatic form will reveal itself as platitudinous and effete. That which may have sounded like righteous teaching when it was remote and wordy will be challenged afresh when it is obliged to simulate life itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I always get back to the question, is it really necessary that men should consume so much of their bodily and mental energies in t...he machinery of civilised life? The world seems to me to do much of its toil for that which is not in any sense bread. Again, does not the latent feeling that much of their striving is to no purpose tend to infuse large quantities of sham into men's work?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, "I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me... the story of your life." I mean people are going to say, "You're crazy." Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Since childhood, I have been enchanted by the fact and the symbolism of the right hand and the left--the one the doer, the other t...he dreamer. The right is order and lawfulness, le droit. Its beauties are those of geometry and taut implication. Reaching for knowledge with the right hand is science. Yet to say only that much of science is to overlook one of its excitements, for the great hypotheses of science are gifts carried in the right hand. Of the left hand we say that it is awkward and, while it has been proposed that art students can seduce their proper hand to more expressiveness by drawing first with the left, we nonetheless suspect this function. The French speak of the illegitimate descendent as being à main gauche, and, though the heart is virtually at the center of the thoracic cavity, we listen for it on the left. Sentiment, intuition, bastardy. And should we say that reaching for knowledge with the left hand is art? Again it is not enough, for as surely as the recital of a daydream differs from the well-wrought tale, there is a barrier between undisciplined fantasy and art. To climb the barrier requires a right hand adept at technique and artifice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Suppose they had saved up all my punishments?" she went on, talking more to herself than to the kitten. "What would they do at th...e end of a year? I should be sent to prison, I suppose, when the day came. Or--let me see--suppose each punishment was to be going without a dinner: then, when the miserable day came, I should have to go without fifty dinners at once! Well, I shouldn't mind that much! I'd far rather go without them than eat them!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the way--about Bolshevism: one has to remember that all that is published in the press is propaganda, that the Bolsheviki are t...he moderate social-revolutionaries, a political party, and the Soviets are a system of government based on the idea of "pure democracy" (Mso called in the textbooks on gov't) that every man shall take direct part in the government of the country--which is arrived at by industrial representation through the heirarchy of soviets, and that much the same system would be in vogue in America--(geographical instead of industrial units) if Hamilton and the rest had taken the New England town-meeting as the unit of government instead of importing Montesquieu's ideas. It's silly to idealize things in Russia, but it is criminal to condemn them unheard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function ...of people's "thinking" and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that... much was accomplished, and much was begun in us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »