The fairytale is irresponsible; it is frankly imaginary, and its purpose is to gratify wishes, "as a dream doth flatter." It heroe...s and heroines, though of delightfully high station, wealth, beauty, etc., are simply individuals; "certain prince," "a lovely princess." The end of the story is always satisfying, though by no means always moral; the hero's heroism may be slyness or luck quite as readily as integrity or valor. The theme is generally the triumph of an unfortunate one--an enchanted maiden, a youngest son, a poor Cinderella, an alleged fool--over his or her superiors.... In short, the fairytale is a form of "wishful thinking," and the Freudian analysis of it fully explains why it is perennially attractive, yet never believed by adults even in the telling. Myth, on the other hand, whether literally believed or not, is taken with religious seriousness, either as a historic fact or as a "mystic" truth. Its typical theme is tragic, not utopian; and its personages tend to fuse into stable personalities of supernatural character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Theology starts with dogmas, philosophy begins with problems. Philosophy sees the problem first, theology has the answer in advanc...e. We must not, however, disregard another important difference. Not only are the problems of philosophy not identical with the problems of religion; their status is not the same. Philosophy is, in a sense, a kind of thinking that has a beginning but no end. In it, the awareness of the problem outlives all solutions. Its answers are questions in disguise; every new answer giving rise to new questions. In religion, on the other hand, the mystery of the answer hovers over all questions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover,... serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammeled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I remember the almost daily talks of my mother on the cruelty of slavery. I would say nothing to her, but I was thinking all the t...ime that slavery did not seem so cruel. Master and Mistress Jennings were not mean to my mother. It was she who was mean to them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[W]e are all guilty in some Measure of the same narrow way of Thinking ... when we fancy the Customs, Dresses, and Manners of othe...r Countries are ridiculous and extravagant, if they do not resemble those of our own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »