Others

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another, 2 Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.

But who is this, what thing of sea or land? Female of sex it seems, That so bedeck’d, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for th’ isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill’d, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play; An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger?

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make abody of more or less connected legend, rangingfrom the large and cosmogonic, to the level ofromantic fairy-story—the larger founded onthe lesser in contact with the earth, the lesserdrawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; tomy country.

 

Mastering the lawless science of our law,

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.

 

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.

 

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

 

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

Let you hold in mind, girls, that your beauty must pass

 

To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black if the hierarchical Church so defines it.

 

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

 

No generalization is wholly true—not even this one.

 

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

 

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

 

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.

 

The truth is, that the law is always approaching, and never reaching, consistency. It is forever adopting new principles from life at one end, and it always retains old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off. It will become entirely consistent only when it ceases to grow.

 

The law embodies the story of a nation’s development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.

 

The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience. The felt necessities of the time, the prevalent moral and political theories, intuitions of public policy, avowed or unconscious, even the prejudices which judges share with their fellow-men, have had a good deal more to do than the syllogism in determining the rules by which men should be governed.

 

The state should, I think, be called “Anaesthesia.” This signifies insensibility. . . . The adjective will be “Anaesthetic.” Thus we might say the state of Anaesthesia, or the anaesthetic state.

 

[ Advice to writers :] First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. . . . Habit is persistence in practice.

 

Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.