What Is Man? and Other Essays

Y.M. (_After a reflective pause) _Temperament. Well, I see one must allow for temperament. It is a large factor, sure enough. My mother is thoughtful, and not hot-tempered. When...

The next superstition is that a man has a standard of his own. He hasn’t. He thinks he has, but he hasn’t. He thinks he can tell what he regards as a good cigar from what he reg...

It is peaceful here and pleasant at Interlaken. Nothing going on—at least nothing but brilliant life-giving sunshine. There are floods and floods of that. One may properly speak...

O.M. Well, take a “flash of wit”—repartee. Flash is the right word. It is out instantly. There is no time to arrange the words. There is no thinking, no reflecting. Where there...

These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening, and that you have confidence in me, I wil...

And in a closet she had hidden a surprise for me—a thing I have often wished I owned: a noble big globe. I couldn’t see it for the tears. She will never know the pride I take in...

O.M. When he does it, it is the law of _his_ make. _He_ can’t bear to see the child in that peril (a man of a different make _could_), and so he tries to save the child, and los...

O.M. I know them well. They are extremes, abnormals; their temperaments are as opposite as the poles. Their life-histories are about alike—but look at the results! Their ages ar...

WHAT IS MAN? THE DEATH OF JEAN THE TURNING-POINT OF MY LIFE HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK THE MEMORABLE ASSASSINATION A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY SWITZERLAND, THE CRADLE OF LIB...

Next day, which was Sunday, we left for the opera-house—that is to say, the Wagner temple—a little after the middle of the afternoon. The great building stands all by itself, gr...

Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn’t any. He said that that was a defect which wou...

O.M. That is about the state of it—intellectuality. There are pronounced limitations on both sides. We can’t learn to understand much of their language, but the dog, the elephan...

Y.M. Yes, it has the look of it. But here is a point: we pay that tax knowing it to be unjust and an extortion; yet we go away with a pain at the heart if we think we have been...

Can that be an agreeable atmosphere to persons in whom this music produces a sort of divine ecstasy and to whom its creator is a very deity, his stage a temple, the works of his...

I have just now fallen upon a darling literary curiosity. It is a little book, a manuscript compilation, and the compiler sent it to me with the request that I say whether I thi...

Have the Works been claimed by a dozen? They haven’t. There was good reason. The world knows there was but one man on the planet at the time who was competent—not a dozen, and n...

I wish we could adopt it in place of our present written (and printed) character. I mean _simply _the alphabet; simply the consonants and the vowels—I don’t mean any _reductions...

It was noon, now. Two hours of stillness and waiting followed. Then carriages began to flow past and deliver the two or three hundred court personages and high nobilities privil...

This hen has laid the egg of a new dynasty and realizes the imposing magnitude of the event. She is giving notice in the usual way. You notice I am improving in the construction...

And what does the same high authority say about Shakespeare? He had “a deep technical knowledge of the law,” and an easy familiarity with “some of the most abstruse proceedings...

In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five or six of them; you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was disappointed. I had been meditating a bi...

The Shakespearite will Reason like this—(that is not my word, it is his). He will say the kitten _may have been_ attending school when nobody was noticing; therefore _we are war...

This law, reduced to its simplest terms, is this: 1. Whatever is sacred to the Christian must be held in reverence by everybody else; 2. whatever is sacred to the Hindu must be...