What one really wants is youth, and what one really loses is years. Life becomes at last a mere piece of acting. One goes on by ha...bit, playing more or less clumsily that one is still alive. It is ludicrous and at times humiliating, but there is a certain style in it which youth has not. We become all, more or less, gentlemen; we are ancien régime; we learn to smile while gout racks us.... We get out of bed in the morning all broken up, without nerves, color or temper, and by noon we are joking with young women about the play. One lives in constant company with diseased hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs; one shakes hands with certain death at closer embrace every day; one sees paralysis in every feature and feels it in every muscle; all one's functions relax their action day by day; and, what is worse, one's grasp on the interests of life relaxes with the physical relaxation; and, through it all, we improve; our manners acquire refinement; our sympathies grow wider; our youthful self-consciousness disappears; very ordinary men and women are found to have charm; our appreciations have weight; we should almost get to respect ourselves if we knew of anything human to respect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is my contention that civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite... in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what... from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active ...voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wealth and prosperity of the country are only the comeliness of the body, the fullness of the flesh and fat; but the spirit is... independent of them; it requires only muscle, bone and nerve for the true exercise of its functions. We cannot lose our liberty, because we cannot cease to think.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is infli...cted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
With a generous endowment of motherhood provided by legislation, with all laws against voluntary motherhood and education in its m...ethods repealed, with the feminist ideal of education accepted in home and school, and with all special barriers removed in every field of human activity, there is no reason why woman should not become almost a human thing. It will be time enough then to consider whether she has a soul.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is an esoteric doctrine of society that a little wickedness is good to make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands an...d legs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To play is nothing but the imitative substitution of a pleasurable, superfluous and voluntary action for a serious, necessary, imp...erative and difficult one. At the cradle of play as well as of artistic activity there stood leisure, tedium entailed by increased spiritual mobility, a horror vacui, the need of letting forms no longer imprisoned move freely, of filling empty time with sequences of notes, empty space with sequences of form.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »