Word: effortless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Joseph Mitchell, whom he calls "the best writer at the New Yorker," Mitchell, he says, can write about people without seeming to examine them or condescend to them. "The sentences seem to have appeared there on magic slates--the whole process looks effortless...
...have made the modern world: "If there had not been those early Greek thinkers who created philosophy, there would be no atomic bombs." Barrett's narrative of the stages in between is highly speculative. But his hold on elusive ideas is so sure, his erudition so vast and effortless, that a coherent historical design gradually emerges: Aristotle's invention of logic culminated in the scientific discoveries of Kepler, Copernicus and Galileo in the 16th and 17th centuries, and, two centuries later, in the Nietzschean quest for "mastery over nature by its own instruments." This is the essence...
...suits her talent, for she makes the transformation from the naive country girl to the worldly courtesan (and back again) with ease. Better still, the woman she becomes has a way of flashing glimpses of the girl she once was that is very touching, mostly because it is so effortless and unselfconscious...
Seven years ago, when curiosity attracted me to an introductory lecture describing the program, two things stuck in my mind. One was the central objective, to develop the full potential of the individual, a reasonable goal. The other was the description of the simple, effortless technique that was supposed to accomplish this. The description of the thinking process and how transcending it could produce positive results on all levels of life was new to me, and I had little basis on which to judge its plausibility. However, the word "effortless" was especially meaningful...
...biologist, I was quick to recognize that although effortlessness is unusual in "self-help" techniques, it is very common in nature. In fact, our physical growth from fertilized egg to 60- or 70-kilo, highly differentiated, adult requires little if any conscious effort on our part. This whole immensely complicated process is automatic. Thus, a simple, effortless technique said to be merely a way to optimize nature's own fundamental laws of progress did not seem to contradict anything in the biological world, so I decided to give...