Various

“ Thus Rousseau became prophet in this desert of culture, and called men to repentance. “Back from culture to nature,” was his radical cry; back from what man has made out of himself to what nature meant him to be. Nature gave man free use of his limbs; culture has bound them with all sorts of bindings, until he is stiff, and short-winded, and crippled. According to nature man lives his own life; man is what he seems and seems what he is; according to culture he is cunning, and crafty, and mendacious. ”

“ Not the passive adjustment of man to nature, but the active adjustment of nature to man; nature outside of him and nature inside of him—that is human calling and human culture. Vanishes, also, every I ought. Man refuses to be ridden by a duty spook, but subordinates even duty to himself. Duty, too, is for the sake of man, not man for the sake of duty. In the depths of his own being, man reserves the sovereign right to speak his yes and his no to duty. To his own will he subjects all good and all evil taught him by others, past or present, and thus occupies a standpoint “beyond good and evil.” ”

“ We wanted to get rid not only of rhetoric but of poetic diction. We tried to strip away everything that was artificial, to get a style like speech, as simple as the simplest prose, like a cry of the heart....
Real enjoyment of a beautiful thing is not achieved when a poet tries to teach. It is not the business of a poet to instruct his age. He should be too humble to instruct his age. His business is merely to express himself, whatever that self may be. I would have all American poets keep in mind the example of François Villon. ”

“ Of course these are exceptional people, but take the thousands of able and brainy men and women in labor organizations and idealists in all walks of life. Usually they had very little attention from their parents, either because they had no time or did not know enough. These men and women who had to rub up against the rough edges of our money-making machinery and to stand squarely on their feet facing this world and its problems,—willing to lend a hand, yes, even to give their lives for the betterment of social and economic conditions—these persons are worthy of the name. ”

“ We are slashing away the web, we are learning to think. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the “little old Victorian lady” he has done a full man’s work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him. ”

“ The more inaccessible it is, shining there with a radiance that never falls upon him, the less does he reflect that all is not gold that glitters. Then there is your philanthropist, foremost in culture of mind and heart, surveying the masses far beneath him, in the slime and grime of life, and doubting at last whether any labor of love can lift men up to where he thinks men ought to be ”

“ Every people seems to pass through a period in which it is obsessed with the idea that the causes of popular prosperity are at once motive and criterion of culture; that the natural laws of economics are the universally valid norms of the ebb and flow of human values; that a balance on the balance sheet to the good, the satisfactoriness of the statistics of exports and imports to the wishes of the interested parties, are an occasion for jubilation over the ascent which life has compassed. ”

“ But you must not scoff at age, little bright eyes, for some day you, too, will know age; and you should not jeer at robustness of form, slim one, for the time may come when you, too, will find the burdens of flesh upon you. Above all, do not proclaim too loudly the substitution of Nietzsche for Jesus of the Little Town in the niche of your invisible temple, for when you are broken and forgotten there is no comfort in the Overman. ”

“ Children shall not “sit at our feet” but stand upon our shoulders, that they may have a freer and broader sweep of the horizon. And in our children we shall love the Coming One, prepare the way for Superman, that free, great man who shall have conquered present petty man with all his slave instincts! Such, at all events, are the dreams of the great poetic and prophetic philosopher of the German Fatherland of today.
All great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.—Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. ”

“ And then there is the vast Florence Barclay contingent, largely women, who, because they don’t know what the world is like, don’t want to know, and don’t think anybody should be allowed to know.
The trouble with censorship is that we always want it to apply to other people, never to ourselves. It is our national weakness that we try to prescribe conduct by law, instead of seeing that the individual is strong and truth-seeing, and leaving conduct to take care of itself, allowing ideas to fight their own battles. ”

“ The women of one class have been forced into labor by the sharp driving of hunger. Among the women of the other class have arisen a great number who have turned to seek occupation from an entirely different cause, the no less bitter driving of an unstimulating and ineffective existence, a kind of boiling-over of women’s energy wasted, causing a revolt of the woman-soul against a life of confused purposes, achieving by accident what is achieved at all. ”

“ Superman is precisely the man who overcomes the man of today aweary of life and athirst for death.
This preaching of Superman might be called Messianic. It is the bold faith that we are not the last word of the Word of life; it is the glad hope that the best treasures, the greatest deeds, the supreme goals of humankind are still in the future. Nietzsche’s message is a breath of spring blowing over the land proclaiming the advent of an issue from the womb of time of something greater, better than anything we have been, than anything we have called good or great ”

“ Nothing is more irritating to a really modern critic than to have to join in a chorus of universal praise. It is particularly irritating when the person acclaimed is a Nobel prize winner, for surely those of us who sit in private judgment in secluded places ought to be able to discern values subtler than the ones open to the eyes of some mysterious frock-coated and silk-hatted jury of professors in Stockholm, or wherever it may be. The very marrow in the bones of criticism curdles at the thought of agreeing with a popular award. ”

“ And the best traditions make the best rebels. Euripides is the child of a strong and splendid tradition and is, together with Plato, the fiercest of all rebels against it.... Euripides, like ourselves, comes in an age of criticism, following upon an age of movement and action. And for the most part, like ourselves, he accepts the general standards on which the movement and action were based. He accepts the Athenian ideals of free thought, free speech, democracy, ‘virtue,’ and patriotism. He arraigns his country because she is false to them. ”

“ Now it was from an entirely different side, indeed it was from an entirely different standpoint, that Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated modern culture, particularly the national culture of the German Fatherland. What horrified him was not simply the content, but the criterion, of our culture. He sharply scrutinized the ideals which we set ourselves in our culture. He found not simply our achievements but our ideals, ourselves even, so inferior, so vulgar, so contemptible, that he began to doubt whether even the Germans could be recognized as a culture people or not. ”

“ Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.
Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. ”

“ So you who are readers should encourage American poets to strive to become very simple, very humble. Your poet must put the fervor of his life into his work, giving you his emotions before the world, the evil with the good, not thinking whether he is a good man or a bad man, or whether he is teaching you. A poet does not know whether he is a good man. ”

“ Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his “friends” live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied—but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men’s impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. ”

“ When it comes to the question of an education broad enough to fit the needs of every child, we may all pause and take a deep breath. We may not approve of a school of moving pictures, advocated by Judge Lindsey, and yet we may not wish to go to the other extreme of severe discipline advocated by Miss Repplier. If only all children were of exactly the same type, so that the same kind of schooling would suffice for all their needs! Or even if they could come from the same kind of homes with more or less similar ideals! ”

“ To get near to the social advance for which all moderns hunger, is it not necessary to have first of all understanding? How can I love my neighbor if I do not understand him? And it is just in the wider diffusion of this understanding that the work of a great writer helps the advance of mankind. ”

“ We shall learn that there are factors in our sex-impulses that require to be lived down as out-of-date and no longer beneficial to the social needs of life. But encouragement will come as, looking backwards, we learn how the mighty dynamic of sex-love has evolved in fineness, without losing in intensity, how it is tending to become more mutual, more beautiful, more lasting. ”

“ But all this time Julia has refused to marry Billy, though she’s in love with him. Her only reason is that something tells her to wait.
Inevitably the women mourn the loss of their wings; and just as they become reconciled to a second-hand joy in their daughters’ flights, Peachy’s husband informs her that flying is unwomanly—that woman’s place is in the home, not in the air (!) —and that their daughter must be shorn of her wings as soon as she’s eighteen. ”

“ Now heights and depths, distinctions and distances, these are valid in the world of quantity, not of quality; of possession, not of being; of tax tables, not of human essence and human power! Now all men are equal! But Nietzsche knew that if men are equal they are not free; if free they are not equal. ”

“ By virtue of society’s struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs’ world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist ”

“ But now, when I open the ordinary American magazine, I find that all we rebelled against in those early days—the sentimentality, the rhetoric, the “moral uplift”—still exists here. Not because you are too far from England, but because you are too far from Paris.
It is from Paris that nearly all the great influences in art and literature have come, from the time of Chaucer until now. Today the metrical experiments of French poets are overwhelming in their variety and delicacy. The best English writing is dominated by French criticism; in France is the great critical mind. ”

“ In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial. ”

“ She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do—just as men are—and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor—not by being denied the full reward of their toil.
Mrs. Gallichan does not advance upon the contribution of Mrs. Schreiner, as Mrs. Schreiner did upon that of Mrs. Stetson; but she had less opportunity to do so: Mrs. Schreiner did not leave so much for some one else to say. But Mrs. Gallichan has summarized all that has been said more fully than any other writer has done; and she has done it so interestingly, so ably, that she deserves grateful praise. ”

“ I hope no criticism will influence you to change it.
You agree, evidently, with the point that The Dark Flower suggests a Greek classic; so do I. But, conceding that, how could you have been surprised that countless people care nothing for it? Don’t you know that the majority of people in the world do not really “possess” the Greek classics? Without the background of the world’s thought, ages ago, and its progress—unless we agree with Alfred Russell Wallace that we have made no progress—can’t you see that The Dark Flower could genuinely startle many people? ”

“ Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky—drifted. The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light. One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity ”