In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument y...ou write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented wit...h flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mine which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with a mass of meaner minerals.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You may chisel a boy into shape, as you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better kind, as you would a piece of br...onze. But you cannot hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converse...s with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. The Sense of Feeling can indeed give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but at the same time it is very much straightened and confined in its Operations, to the Number, Bulk, and Distance of its particular Objects. Our Sight seems designed to supply all these Defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch, that spreads its self over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
the whole seems to fall into a shape As if I saw alike my work and self... And all that I was born to be and do, A twilight-piece. Love, we are in God's hand.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 »
Greek is the embodiment of the fluent speech that runs or soars, the speech of a people which could not help giving winged feet to... its god of art. Latin is the embodiment of the weighty and concentrated speech which is hammered and pressed and polished into the shape of its perfection, as the ethically minded Romans believed that the soul also should be wrought.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To the intelligent, nature converts itself into a vast promise, and will not be rashly explained. Her secret is untold. Many and m...any an Oedipus arrives: he has the whole mystery teeming in his brain. Alas! the same sorcery has spoiled his skill; no syllable can he shape on his lips.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »