Emotional Architecture as Compared to Intellectual (1894)
Context: The human mind in all countries having gone to the uttermost limit of its own capacity, flushed with its conquests, haughty after its self-assertion upon emerging from the prior dark age, is now nearing a new phase, a phase inherent in the nature and destiny of things.
The human mind, like the silk-worm oppressed with the fullness of its own accumulation, has spun about itself gradually and slowly a cocoon that at last has shut out the light of the world from which it drew the substance of its thread. But this darkness has produced the chrysalis, and we within the darkness feel the beginning of our throes. The inevitable change, after centuries upon centuries of preparation, is about to begin.
“It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.”
Cornell Chronicle interview (1999)
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M. H. Abrams 19
American literary theorist 1912–2015Related quotes
Associated Press interview in Paris (7 November 1978); repeated on several occasions before Khomeini returned to Iran
Foreign policy
“Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived.”
Drawn and Quartered (1983)
Variant translation by Lin Yutang: "A man should not marry after thirty if he is not already married, and should not enter the government service if he is not already in the service. At fifty, he should not start to raise a family, and at sixty should not travel abroad. This is because there is a time for everything; done out of season and time, there may be more disadvantages than advantages. One wakes up at dawn completely refreshed, washes his face and puts on the headdress, has his breakfast; chews willow branches [for brightening his teeth], and attends to various things. Before he knows it he asks is it noon, and is told it is long past noon. As the morning goes, so goes the afternoon, and as one day passes, so pass the 36,000 days of one's life. If one is going to be upset by this thought, how can one ever enjoy life? I often wonder at a statement that such and such a person is so many years old. By this one means an accumulation of years. But where have the years accumulated? Can one lay hold of them and count them? This shows that the me of the past has long vanished. Moreover, when I have completed this sentence, the preceding sentence has already vanished. That is the tragedy." (The Importance of Understanding, 1960; pp. 83–84)
Preface to Water Margin
“Nothing ages a woman like living in the country.”
L'Envers du music hall (Music Hall Sidelights), "On Tour" (1913)
“There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.”
A Guide for the Bedevilled
Books
“Shakespeare's stage must hold the glass to every age.”
The Ancient And Modern Muses
[Sarah Boxes, The Contraception Conundum: It's Not Just Birth Control Anymore, The New York Times, 1997-06-22, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEFD6153BF931A15755C0A961958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2, 2008-02-09]