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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

History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art History Philosophy
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.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Airplane Player Wisdom
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
The heart wakens from coma and its dyspnea ends. Its strengthening pulse is to cross over into campground, to believe that the world has not been altogether lost or, if lost, then not altogether in vain.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Altogether Campground Coma Pulse Strengthening Weaken
It 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 DEVOTO

Civilization Condition Country Finish Permanent
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
Art is man determined to die sane.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Art Determined Men
The only places where American medicine can fully live up to its possibilities are the teaching hospitals.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Medicine Possibility Teaching
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 trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
BERNARD DEVOTO

Reason Refuse Trouble
A 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 DEVOTO

Mad May Novelists
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
When 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 DEVOTO

Believe Food Heart Lifeward
This 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 DEVOTO

Believe Shadow Watches

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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