Economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow.
We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy.
I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.
Mr. James Joyce is a great man who is entirely without taste.
Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.
... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.
Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.
The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.
One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one's husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing better to offer than one's own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one's own achievements one was without taste.
I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.
To those who fall and hurt themselves one runs with comfort; by those who lie dangerously stricken by a disease one sits and waits.
it is necessary that we should all have a little of the will to die, because otherwise we would find the performance of our biological duty of death too difficult.
Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned.
a good oyster cannot please the palate as acutely as a bad one can revolt it, and a good oyster cannot make him who eats it live for ever though a bad one can make him dead for ever.
The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.
I've never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?
When anything important has to be written ... I think your hand concentrates for you.
Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.
A child is an adult temporarily enduring conditions which exclude the possibility of happiness.
There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.
The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
All disgrace smells alike. Differences in ruin are only matters of degree.
Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.
It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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