A man can do anything he wants to do in this world, at least if he wants to do it badly enough. |
A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring. |
A poet's pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. |
A writer is like a bean plant - he has his little day, and then gets stringy |
An intelligence service is, in fact, a stupidity service |
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. |
Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. ... [The businessman] is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers caparisoned like a knight. This we should be tolerant of--every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. ... A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning. |
Be obscure clearly. |
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. |
Computing machines perhaps can do the work of a dozen ordinary men, but there is no machine that can do the work of one extraordinary man. |
Deathlessness should be arrived at in a... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog. |
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time |
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time |
English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. |
Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. |