Thermodynamics is the kingdom also of running current history as well as polemics, not to mention verbosity. In no other discipline have the same equations been published over and over again so many times by different authors in different ill-defined notations and therefore claimed as his own by each; in no other has a single author seen fit to publish essentially the same ideas over and over again within a period of twenty years; and nowhere else is the ratio of talk and excuse to reason and result so high.
When inward life dries up, when feeling decreases and apathy increases, when one cannot affect or even genuinely touch another person, violence flares up as a daimonic necessity for contact, a mad drive forcing touch in the most direct way possible.
Love and Will
Professor Branestawm, like all great men, had simple tastes. He wore simple trousers with two simple legs. His coat was simply fastened with safety pins because the buttons had simply fallen off...
"The Professor Invents a Machine"
The puppets which perform before the curtains / are already an illusion. / A painting of puppets has moved still further / from reality. / But just consider that the sky / is also a vast curtain: / then which of us is not an actor on this stage?
"Inscribed on Paintings for the People of Hangchow", translated by Jonathan Chaves in The Columbia Book of Later Chinese Poetry
For that moment she shared an overwhelming sense of wonder and elation -- the joy and beauty of pure mathematics. It was the only language possible in that narrow instant of triumph.
"Dr. Pak's Preschool"
Privately owned radio has often been successful in its own terms: profitability, stability, unflagging mediocrity.
I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound.
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
We owe most of what we know to about one hundred men. We owe most of what we have suffered to another hundred or so.
In all such cases there is one common circumstance -- the system has a quantity of potential energy, which is capable of being transformed into motion, but which cannot begin to be so transformed till the system has reached a certain configuration, to attain which requires an expenditure of work, which in certain cases may be infinitesimally small, and in general bears no definite proportion to the energy developed in consequence thereof. For example, the rock loosed by frost and balanced on a singular point of the mountain side, the little spark which kindles the great forest, the little word which sets the world a-fighting, the little scruple which prevents a man from doing his will, the little spore which blights all the potatoes, the little gemmule which makes us philosophers or idiots. Every existence above a certain rank has its singular points: the higher the rank the more of them. At these points, influences whose physical magnitude is too small to be taken account of by a finite being, may produce results of the greatest importance.
Above all nations is humanity.
There's only one me, and I'm stuck with him.
What is this life if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare?
"Leisure"
There are, of course, several things in Ontario that are more dangerous than wolves. For instance, the step-ladder.
We have beside us a mountain of Books, Magazines, Pamphlets and Newspapers, that have been accumulating for the last two months, unopened and unread. Like a Turk, in the dim twilight of his Harem, we scarcely know which to choose, but, we shall commence at the apex of the pyramid, and dig downwards.
There's a saying among prospectors, "Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find."
As a child I lived in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, and it was there that I ran into the curious assumption that the world around me was full of common people. This was never said in so many words. It was just understood that greatness or extra value as a human being existed only among the dead, or else it was an attribute of someone far away, whom one never met. I grew up feeling the full weight of my insignificance, and slowly, slowly began to build up my ego. Receiving no help from the environment, I withdrew from it into a world of imagination which was particularly illuminated by fiction stories which I read...
In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence.
Food is rotting in warehouses, being burned and dumped into the sea. It is the money system destroying food to maintain prices.
In order to invent the airplane you must have at least a thousand years' experience dreaming of angels.
For a person to live in a country, and to be ignorant of its history on almost every issue that comes up, means that he is really walking around in the dark all the time. I think that history can give you a sense of courage in a difficult and dark world. You can say to yourself: I at least know something about this world, I know how it got the way it is, I know where it's possibly going, not certainly but possibly. I can stand up against the world.
Somehow the people who do as they please seem to get along just about as well as those who are always trying to please others.
Of all national assets archives are the most precious; they are the gift of one generation to another and the extent of our care of them marks the extent of our civilization.
The Canadian Archives and Its Activities
That is not really a question I can answer. I try and understand him, thus making him live again for the reader. But it is as if you were asking me if I like one of the characters in my novels -- you neither like nor dislike them. You have to bring them alive. That is all.
When asked if he liked Sir Thomas More, subject of one of Ackroyd's biographies
There seems to be a strong correlation between people who relish tough football and people who relish intimidating and beating the hell out of Commies, hippies, protest marchers and other opposition groups. Watching well-advertised strong men knock other people around, make them hurt, is in the end like other tastes. It does not weaken with feeding. It grows.
Some people say the animals see the straight path and flee from it in fear, for they know it was built by men.
A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means. The idea of useful or ornamental is seldom associated here even with the most magnificent timber trees, such as among the Druids had been consecrated, and among the Greeks would have sheltered oracles and votive temples. The beautiful faith which assigned to every tree of the forest its guardian nymph, to every leafy grove its tutelary divinity, would find no votaries here. Alas! for the Dryads and Hamadryads of Canada!
A day without a pun is a day without sunshine; there is gloom for improvement.
Every time I try to define a perfectly stable person, I am appalled by the dullness of that person.
Art history is the nightmare from which art is struggling to awake.
It is a rotten world / Artful politicians are its bane / Its saving grace is the / Artlessness of the young / And the wonders of the sky.
Epitaph, Ross Bay Cemetery, Victoria
Some commentators have suggested that I do not really exist, that I am the figment of the imagination of certain newspaper columnists and television producers. Personally, I reject this extreme view.
The German method is to go to the principle of things, to select the wrong principle, and to build on that.
Every woman needs one man in her life who is strong and responsible. Given this security, she can proceed to do what she really wants to do -- fall in love with men who are weak and irresponsible.
In some of the poorer areas of the world it is sadly true that sex is the only luxury available to the ordinary man. Whether the ordinary woman also considers it a luxury is open to question.
"Why is The McGill Daily?" / Asked the pessimist sourly. / "Thank God," said the optimist gaily, / "That it isn't hourly!"
Wherever a set of alternative possible routes toward achieving a given end presents itself, a student movement will tend to choose the one which involves a higher measure of violence or humiliation directed against the older generation.