Wit is a lean creature with sharp inquiring nose, whereas humor has a kindly eye and a comfortable girth. Wit, if it be necessary,... uses malice to score a point--like a cat it is quick to jump--but humor keeps the peace in an easy chair. Wit has a better voice in a solo, but humor comes into the chorus best. Wit is as sharp as a stroke of lightning, whereas humor is diffuse like sunlight. Wit keeps the season's fashions and is precise in the phrases and judgments of the day, but humor is concerned with homely eternal things. Wit wears silk, but humor in homely-spun endures the wind. Wit sets a snare, whereas humor goes off whistling without a victim in its mind. Wit is sharper company at the table, but humor serves better in mischance and in the rain. When it tumbles wit is sour, but humor goes uncomplaining without its dinner. Humor laughs at another's jest and holds its sides, while wit sits wrapped in study for a lively answer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a conceptual depth as well as a purely visual depth. The first is discovered by science; the second is revealed in art. T...he first aids us in understanding the reasons of things; the second in seeing their forms. In science we try to trace phenomena back to their first causes, and to general laws and principles. In art we are absorbed in their immediate appearance, and we enjoy this appearance to the fullest extent in all its richness and variety. Here we are not concerned with the uniformity of laws but with the multiformity and diversity of intuitions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We think of religion as the symbolic expression of our highest moral ideals; we think of magic as a crude aggregate of superstitio...ns. Religious belief seems to become mere superstitious credulity if we admit any relationship with magic. On the other hand our anthropological and ethnographical material makes it extremely difficult to separate the two fields.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Some animals, especially domesticated animals, are extremely susceptible to signs. A dog will react to the slightest change in the... behavior of his master; he will even distinguish the expressions of a human face or the modulations of a human voice. But it is far cry from these phenomena to an understanding of symbolic and human speech.... Symbols--in the proper sense of this term--cannot be reduced to mere signals. Signals and symbols belong to two different universes of discourse: a signal is a part of the physical world of being; a symbol is a part of the human world of meaning. Signals are "operators"; symbols are "designators."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don't want to see another commission that studies the ...needs of kids. We need to help them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The conflict between science and religion is in reality a misunderstanding of both. Scientific materialism has merely introduced a... new hypostasis, and that is an intellectual sin. It has given another name to the supreme principle of reality and has assumed that this created a new thing and destroyed an old thing. Whether you call the principle of existence "God," "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have merely changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician malgré lui. Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive ...and unrealistic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If men and women use their brains differently in thinking about rhymes, does that say that women may feel a different sort of plea...sure ... from what men feel?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »