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 trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole.
More Bernard DeVoto Quotes
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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. . . .
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The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.
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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.
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The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act.
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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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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.
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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.
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History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
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The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.
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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.
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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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Art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate.
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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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You can no more keep a Martini in the refrigerator than you can keep a kiss there.
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The parks preserve it permanently in the inheritance of the American citizens.
BERNARD DEVOTO