Lapham’s Quarterly

To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy.

The brightest light burns the quickest.

I care. I care about it all. It takes too much energy not to care.

Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.

I imagine that one of the first forms of behavior, like one of the first signals, may be reduced to this: “Keep me warm.”

There’s plenty of fire in the coldest flint!

Jazz is the result of the energy stored up in America.

Is it a fact—or have I dreamed it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

A first-class man subsists on the matter he destroys.

Will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament.

Fire is a natural symbol of life and passion, though it is the one element in which nothing can actually live.

At the start there’s always energy.

The fundamental concept in social science is power, in the same sense in which energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

What is life but organized energy?

If I had been born a man, I would have conquered Europe. As I was born a woman, I exhausted my energy in tirades against fate and in eccentricities.

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.

Fire destroys that which feeds it.

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry to equanimity, receptivity, and peace is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal center of energy.

Oil dependency is not just an economic attachment but appears as a kind of cognitive compulsion.