Common sense is not a single unique conception, identical in time and space. It is the "folklore" of philosophy, and, like folklore, it takes countless different forms. Its most fundamental character is that it is a conception which, even in the brai...
Ideas and opinions are not spontaneously "born" in each individual brain: they have had a centre of formation, or irradiation, of dissemination, of persuasion-a group of men, or a single individual even, which has developed them and presented them in...
You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was , which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-...
They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and ...
Through sheer volume of passing days you will travel a great distance in your lifetime. Imagine where you might stand if your footsteps steered toward a single goal.
You really are a pain in the ass,” he laughs. I swat him playfully, laughing too as a single tear rolls down my cheek. He wipes it away and tucks my hair behind my ear, “But you’re my pain in the ass.
To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.
If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the...
The single most powerful element of youth is that you don't have the life experiences to know what can't be done.
I learned very quickly that when you emigrate, you lose the crutches that have been your support; you must begin from zero, because the past is erased with a single stroke and no one cares where you’re from or what you did before.
Some believe that art is the imitation of nature; in fact, nature is so sublime that it cannot be imitated. However noble it may be, art cannot perform a single one of the miracles of nature. And besides, why imitate nature when it can be perceived b...
It is strange how intricately life hangs in the scales, and how unrelated events and single decisions alter the outcomes. Some remote land ten thousand miles from me, some land unfamiliar to me, held the key to my future.
No, what Great Aunt Winifred was suffering from was the persecution every happily single woman suffers: the predictable social condemnation of her independence and childlessness. Dorothy reminded herself of what she'd learned during a university cour...
The only thing more dangerous then a vampire crazed with blood lust was a vampire crazed with anything else. All the meticulous single-mindedness that went into finding young women who slept with their bedroom window open got channeled into some othe...
I’m aloof in love, like a single horse hoof. All I need to ride off into the sunset is one woman—with three legs. I’m on the lookout for a Buy One Pair of Shoes and Get One Half Pair Half Off deal.
We’re going to go in the back room as two singles, copulate back there, and come out a couple. Somebody go tell my clone where I am so he doesn’t go file a missing person’s report on himself.
And in that moment, I felt my own ignorance spread suddenly out behind me like a pair of wings, and every single thing I didn’t know was a feather on those wings. I could feel them tugging at the air, restless to be airborne.
This planet is a broken bone that didn’t set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. We’ve been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we’re supposed to. But it’s a...
I thought the morning would bring change. But I should have known that it doesn't take that long for change to happen - it takes a second. A moment. In a single breath, reality as you know it can simply fall away.
The earth is an orbiting speck in incomprehensible vastness. The histories of our civilizations, our accomplishments and secrets, great good and evil—these are no more significant than the single twinkle of a star. Perhaps, this is why we try to ou...
