When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
Civilization begins with distillation
Interpretation
What this quote means
Civilization's progress starts with the refinement of basic elements into something greater.
William Faulkner's quote suggests that the development of civilization relies on the ability to distill and refine raw materials, ideas, and culture into more sophisticated and organized forms. This distillation represents not only the literal process of extracting purities from substances but also the metaphorical process of enhancing human experiences and knowledge, leading to the creation of a more advanced society.
Themes
CivilizationDistillationProgressRefinementSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about technological advancements, one might say, 'As William Faulkner aptly put it, Civilization begins with distillation, underscoring the crucial role of innovation in our progress.'
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When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
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Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
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He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
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