Famous quotes containing the words civil, criminal and/or contempt:
“Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else. Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap. The luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days. The luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth; and of electricity, not the volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable stream on the battery-wires. So of spirit, or energy; the rests or remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals in the Pacific.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“How many condemnations I have witnessed more criminal than the crime!”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Allusion has been made to [Proust’s] contempt for the literature that “describes,” for the realists and naturalists worshipping the offal of experience, prostrate before the epidermis and the swift epilepsy, and content to transcribe the surface, the façade, behind which the Idea is prisoner.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)