176
Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.
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177
This danger is greatly heightened, as it has been always observable that men are less jealous of encroachments of one department upon another than upon their own reserved rights.
178
was it not obvious that flocks and herds were more ready to obey their keepers than men their rulers
179
The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.
180
Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.
181
To not only take risks, but to be open to life. To accept new views and to be open to new opinions.
182
A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
183
It is not down in any map; true places never are
184
it is nevertheless often true that one man's vulgarity is another's lyric
185
The dullest eye in the world must surely be quickened by such trees as these.
186
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
187
A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission.
188
A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, or even the mere mechanical labour of copying, may be employed, to evade and shuffle off real labour—the real labour of thinking.
Joshua Reynoldsverified·Discourse XII, in Fifteen Discourses Delivered in the Royal Academy·December 10, 1784
189
Acquire a method of perceiving how all things change into one another.
190
But we have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more are we capable of seeing.
191
I was thrown out of work, and now that I had got into the habit of writing I did not know what to make of my spare time.
192
It is better therefore to listen patiently to a friend's rebuke, for if he should afterwards do wrong himself and so need rebuke, he has set you the example of freedom of speech.
193
Clumsy indeed are all words the moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left.
194
What right have I to be free, that another man cannot prove himself to possess by nature?
William Lloyd Garrisonverified·No Compromise with Slavery: An Address Delivered in the Broadway Tabernacle, New York·February 14, 1854
195
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.
196
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Wrongly attributed
Voltaire never wrote this. Evelyn Beatrice Hall composed the sentence in 1906 to paraphrase his stance on Helvetius, writing under the pen name S. G. Tallentyre. She later confirmed it was her own phrasing, not a quotation.
197
Necessity is the mother of invention.
198
I suppose the Patron meant that if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.
Wrongly attributed
Sold on posters as an ancient Chinese proverb and as Confucius, Lao Tzu or Maimonides by turns. Its first known appearance in English is this one, in a now-forgotten novel by Thackeray's daughter, published in 1885. What almost nobody quoting it knows is that even here it is second-hand: Max is not stating his own principle, he is guessing at what an absent character called the Patron meant. The wording is also not the familiar one. There is no feed him for a day and no feed him for a lifetime; there is an hour, and a good turn.
199
Then let them eat pastry!
Wrongly attributed
Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said this. Rousseau wrote the anecdote in his Confessions about an unnamed great princess; he had drafted the passage by 1767, when Marie Antoinette was eleven years old and still in Austria. The line was attached to her name decades later. Note the wording: this 1782 translation of the Confessions renders the French brioche as pastry; the familiar English form, let them eat cake, is a later translator's choice.
200
What a misfortune it is that we should thus be compelled to let our boys' schooling interfere with their education!
Wrongly attributed
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education is one of the most-quoted lines attributed to Mark Twain and appears nowhere in his published work, letters or notebooks. The idea's earliest known appearance in this form is Grant Allen's, in 1894. Twain was alive and famous; the sentence was simply reassigned to him afterwards, as hundreds of others have been.