'Only the modern city,' Hegel dares to write, 'offers the mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.' We are thus living in the period of big cities. Deliberately, the world has been amputated of all that constitutes its permanence: nature, the sea, hilltops, evening meditation. Consciousness is to be found only in the streets, because history is to be found only in the streets - this is the edict.

One of the temptations of an artist is to believe himself solitary ...But this is not true. He stands in the midst of all, in the same rank

Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy,…

One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars.

Nor rough, nor barren, are the winding ways Of hoar antiquity, but strown with flowers.

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding-sheet and her worms to fill in the g…

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.