The skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe skillful man is, within the function of his skill, a different psychological organization. . . . A tennis player or a watchmaker or an airplane pilot is an automatism but he is also criticism and wisdom.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
BERNARD DEVOTOSomething can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
BERNARD DEVOTOHistory abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
BERNARD DEVOTONew England is a finished place. Its destiny is that of Florence or Venice, not Milan while the American empire careens onward toward its unpredicted end. . . .
BERNARD DEVOTOBetween the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe water of life was given to us to make us see for a while that we are more nearly men and women, more nearly kind and gentle and generous, pleasanter and stronger than without its vision there is any evidence we are.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe rat stops gnawing in the wood, the dungeon walls withdraw, the weight is lifted your pulse steadies and the sun has found your heart, the day was not bad, the season has not been bad, there is sense and even promise in going on.
BERNARD DEVOTOA novelist has mad a fictional representation of life. I doing so, he has revealed to us more significance, it may be, than he could find in life itself.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTOWhen evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour. It marks the lifeward turn.
BERNARD DEVOTOThe mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTOThis is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affectations glow and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
BERNARD DEVOTOIt is the first American section to be finished to achieve stability in the conditions of its life. It is the first old civilization, the first permanent civilization in America.
BERNARD DEVOTOArt is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
BERNARD DEVOTO