Actual

Famous quotes containing the word actual:

    It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius.... They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
    Simone Weil (1909–1943)