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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

Bernard DeVoto

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 DEVOTO

Airplane Automatism Game Organisation Pilot Player Tennis
Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Armistice Art Fate
The 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 DEVOTO

Food Heart Promise Season Sense Wall
Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Government Race Stupid
The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Reason Refuse Trouble
The West begins where the average annual rainfall drops below twenty inches. When you reach the line which marks that drop – for convenience, the one hundredth meridian – you have reached the West.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Average Lines Twenties
The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Dawn False Knowledge
The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Citizen Country Park Permamnetly Preserve
New 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 DEVOTO

Civilization Destiny Life
The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Individuality Sacred Trouble
The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
BERNARD DEVOTO

May Paper Writing
Art is man determined to die sane.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art Determined Men
You can no more keep a martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there. The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth and one of the shortest-lived.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Earth Happiest Kissing Life Sudden
The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Doe Math Mind
One may lack words to express the impact of beauty but no one who has felt it remains untouched. It is renewal, enlargement, intensification.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Impact Inheritance May
You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Kissing Martini Refrigerator

Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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