The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory--of the absol...ute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Don different from those regal Dons! With hearts of gold and lungs of bronze,... Who shout and bang and roar and brawl The Absolute across the hall,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless; That only men incredulous of despair,... Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air Beat upward to God's throne in loud access Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness, In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare Of the absolute Heavens.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The warning given to Louis XVI: "No, sire, this is not a rebellion, it is a revolution," accents the essential difference. It mean...s precisely that "it is the absolute certainty of a new form of government." Rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. It is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. Revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. Specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas. While even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape action to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. That is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As for an authentic villain, the real thing, the absolute, the artist, one rarely meets him even once in a lifetime. The ordinary ...bad hat is always in part a decent fellow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into... a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. ... Death does away with time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is hardly surprising that children should enthusiastically start their education at an early age with the Absolute Knowledge of... computer science; while they are unable to read, for reading demands making judgments at every line.... Conversation is almost dead, and soon so too will be those who knew how to speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leave...s us where we were. It names things, but does not add things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »