Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins
Context: The horse has not stopped bleeding. Its blood falls on me drop by drop with the regularity of a clock, — as though all the blood that is filtering through the strata of the field and all the punishment of the wounded came to a head in him and through him. Ah, it seems that truth goes farther in all directions than one thought! We bend over the wrong that animals suffer, for them we wholly understand.
Men, men! Everywhere the plain has a mangled outline. Below that horizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, the plain is monumental!
“Ah! as you say, we should slip over many thoughts and act as though we did not perceive them.”
Ah! comme vous dites, il faut glisser sur bien des pensées, et ne faire pas semblant de les voir.
Lettres, 70.
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Ah! comme vous dites, il faut glisser sur bien des pensées, et ne faire pas semblant de les voir.
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Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné 5
French noble 1626–1696Related quotes
“Ah good, there's so many over there you feel they breed them just to put in orphanages.”
Said while presenting a Duke of Edinburgh Award to a student. When informed that the young man was going to help out in Romania for six months, he asked if the student was going to help the Romanian orphans and was told that he was not, as quoted in "Duke under fire for Romanian orphans 'joke'" http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=255&id=998522006 in The Scotsman (8 July 2006)
2000s
A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1929)
Context: We are today, as human beings, evolved and cultured far beyond the taboos which are inherent in our culture. This is a very important fact to realise. Probably, to the Crusaders, mere words were potent and evocative to a degree we can't realise. The evocative power of the so-called obscene words must have been very dangerous to the dim-minded, obscure, violent natures of the Middle Ages, and perhaps are still too strong for slow-minded, half-evoked lower natures today. But real culture makes us give to a word only those mental and imaginative reactions which belong to the mind, and saves us from violent and indiscriminate physical reactions which may wreck social decency. In the past, man was too weak-minded, or crude-minded, to contemplate his own physical body and physical functions, without getting all messed up with physical reactions that overpowered him. It is no longer so. Culture and civilisation have taught us to separate the reactions. We now know the act does not necessarily follow on the thought. In fact, thought and action, word and deed, are two separate forms of consciousness, two separate lives which we lead. We need, very sincerely, to keep a connection. But while we think, we do not act, and while we act we do not think. The great necessity is that we should act according to our thoughts, and think according to our acts. But while we are in thought we cannot really act, and while we are in action we cannot really think. The two conditions, of thought and action, are mutually exclusive. Yet they should be related in harmony.
From Third Avenue On
The Book of Repulsive Women (1915)
"I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet" http://www.csuchico.edu/zapatist/HTML/Archive/Communiques/etaJAN.html January, 2003
Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 182 (1922)