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
Survival
Enabled
Species
Prevents
Principles
Aristocracy
Full
Stimulus
Energy
Avoiding
World
Unnecessary
Stimuli
Survive
Expenditure
Principle
Expenditures

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sentences were used by man before words and still come with the readiness of instinct to his lips. They, and not words, are the foundations of all language. ... Your cat has no words, but it has considerable feeling for the architecture of the sentence in relation to the problem of expressing climax.
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It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk.
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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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Hatred of domestic work is a natural and admirable result of civilization.
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Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.
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There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.
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But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life.
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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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A copy of the universe is not what is required of art one of the damned things is ample.
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I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.
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There is nothing rarer than a man who can be trusted never to throw away happiness, however eagerly he sometimes grasps it. In history we are as frequently interested in our own doom.
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The memory, experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one's mere personal life, that one has merely lived.
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Literature must be an analysis of experience and a synthesis of the findings into a unity.
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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
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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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Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.
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I had a glorious father, I had no father at all.
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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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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West