in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
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Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca. One seems to see a horned and living creature viciously struggling to be restored to the place where it belongs. One word is like a claw, another like a sightless and bleeding eye; and there are phrases which clutch like the pincers of a crab. And all of it is alive with the hideous vitality of things that have organized themselves amid disorganization.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Art)
Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art, the finest of all, perhaps, truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.
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There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Wisdom)
Make a man live for ten times ten.
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Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Love)
To love is to act.
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in Quotes & Aphorisms (Job)
Work, which makes a man free, and thought, which makes him worthy of freedom.
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I only take a half share in the civil war; I am willing to die, I am not willing to kill.
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Popularity? It's glory's small change.
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