Quote

The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.

Rebecca West

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Rebecca West
Age: 90 †
Born: 1892
Born: December 21
Died: 1983
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Suffragette
Writer
London
England
Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield
Full
Stimulus
Energy
Avoiding
World
Unnecessary
Stimuli
Survive
Expenditure
Principle
Expenditures
Survival
Enabled
Species
Prevents
Principles
Aristocracy

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All men should have a drop of treason in their veins, if nations are not to go soft like so many sleepy pears.
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The childhood of the individual and the race is full of fears, and panic-stricken attempts to avert what is feared by placating the gods with painful sacrifices.
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I have never been able to write with anything more than the left hand of my mind the right hand has always been engaged in something to do with personal relationships. I don't complain, because I think my left hand's power, as much as it has, is due to its knowledge of what my right hand is doing.
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Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.
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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
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There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.
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A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps.
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I take it as a prime cause of the present confusion of society that it is too sickly and too doubtful to use pleasure frankly as a test of value.
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All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing.
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... in the happy laughter of a theatre audience one can get the most immediate and numerically impressive guarantee that there is nothing in one's mind which is not familiar to the mass of persons living at the time.
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A bad short story or novel or poem leaves one comparatively calm because it does not exist, unless it gets a fake prestige throughbeing mistaken for good work. It is essentially negative, it is something that has not come through. But over bad criticism one has a sense of real calamity.
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The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.
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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
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Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted.
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Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts for ever.
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Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.
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Man is a hating rather than a loving animal.
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Those who foresee the future and recognize it as tragic are often seized upon by a madness which forced them to commit the very acts which make it certain that what they dread will happen.
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Reason's a thing we dimly see in sleep.
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The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women are idiots.
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