De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can’t be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse.
What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn’t to make a nobility of us all?
This rest and well-being were only a momentary difference in the strange lining or variable silk between life and void.
Slavery has never really been abolished. More people are enslaved to different things than you can shake a stick at.
And I saw Clara Spohr coming from the Oyster Bar or being washed forth into this sea, dismasted, clinging to her soul in the shipwreck of her beauty.
Why should one man have the power to damage all nature or pollute the entire world?
It means that writers are supposed to make you laugh and cry. That’s what mankind is looking for.
History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think.
Nature is a deep imitator. And as man is the prince of organisms he is master of adaptations. He is the artist of suggestions. He himself is his principle work of art, in the body working in the flesh. What miracle! What triumph! Also, what a disaster! What tears are to be shed!
One of life’s hardest jobs, to make a quick understanding slow.
I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it,” to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison.
You take too many pills of every kind – first stimulants and then depressants, anodynes followed by analeptics, until the poor organism doesn’t know what’s happened.
The people who come to evening classes are only ostensibly after culture. Their great need, their hunger, is for good sense, clarity, truth – even an atom of it. People are dying – it is no metaphor – for lack of something real to carry home when day is done.
Forgetfully, Wilhelm traveled for miles in second gear; he was seldom in the right lane and he neither gave signals nor watched for lights.
Why, it was a crying matter, no fooling, to anyone who might know which side was up, that here was I trying to refuse to lead a disappointed life.
His marriage, too, had been like that. Through such decisions somehow his life had taken form. And so, from the moment when he tasted the peculiar flavor of fatality in Dr. Tamkin, he could no longer keep back the money.
Americans find it hard to believe that foreigners are unalterably foreign, for they have seen generations of immigrants who became Americans. But old cultures are impermeable and exclusive – none more so than the French.
Odd that mankind’s benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to entertain.
He was an extremely correct person except that he never shaved in the morning, not caring, probably, how he looked to the fumblers and the old people and the operators and the gamblers and the idlers of Broadway uptown.
A columnist on the Daily News said that to Ravelstein money was something you threw from the rear platform of speeding trains.
But oh, unreality! Unreality, unreality! That has been my scheme for a troubled but eternal life.