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 DEVOTOThe 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.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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.
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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.
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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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Something can be done with people who put pickled onions in: strangulation seems best.
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When evening quickens in the street, comes a pause in the day’s occupation that is known as the cocktail hour.
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The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.
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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.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
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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.
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Between the amateur and the professional . . . there is a difference not only in degree but in kind.
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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it.
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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