The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
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With monstrous head and sickening cry / And ears like errant wings, / The devil's walking parody / On all four-footed things.
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I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
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[Although Ball is considered a pop singer, he's not a total stranger to Gilbert and Sullivan, having played Frederick in the West End mounting of Joe Papp's memorable production of The Pirates of Penzance . But Patience is a different kind of work--much of its humor is highly topical, poking fun at the short-lived Aesthetic movement that flourished among British dilettantes 125 years ago. Will that humor translate to a New York audience in the year 2005?] I think there's absolutely no difference to how we regarded things then and how we regard things now, ... There are still those performers and artists who strike on a new art form or mode that attracts their fans, while the majority of us may be saying, 'I'm sorry, but isn't that The Emperor's New Clothes?' There will always be charlatans who do things just to get acclaim and adulation. So I think it'll speak to an audience as clearly today as it did then.
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Sorrow everywhere,
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It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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In enterprise of martial kind, when there was any fighting, he led his regiment from behind -- he found it less exciting.
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A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
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The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
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The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.
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It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
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One may understand the Cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
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If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
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The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
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Among the very rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
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All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.
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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
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And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
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The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self-education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
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Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
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The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
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The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment. They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.
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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
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Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
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Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
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A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
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Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
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Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.
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