“[A] piece of literature may be more appropriately compared with a living organism than with a mechanism. As Plato says in one of his dialogues, ‘You will allow that every discourse ought to be constructed like a living organism, having its own body and head and feet; it must have middle and extremities, drawn in a manner agreeable to one another and to the whole.’ A vital order permeates a good poem, short story, or drama, and to a large extent a piece of expository art intended to be primarily ‘useful’ rather than ‘fine.’ “ (p. 105, Writing and Thinking by Norman Foerster and J.M. Steadman, Jr., Houghton Mifflin Company, (c) 1931 Foerster and Steadman.)
June 30, 2009
On Thinking
“Naturally, we begin by thinking, by asking ourselves questions and endeavoring to answer them.” (p. 101, Writing and Thinking by Norman Foerster and J.M. Steadman, Jr., Houghton Mifflin Company, (c) 1931 Foerster and Steadman.)
June 29, 2009
A Mark Twain Quote
“We should be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it – not like the cat that sits on a hot stovelid. She will never sit down on a hot lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.” –Mark Twain (I have not found a citation for this quote, though, so it could be by anyone, as far as I know.)
April 14, 2009
Quote: Gottfried Leibniz
“Music is the pleasure the human soul experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”
(But I have not verified this one, i.e., found its source/citation.)
March 18, 2009
Thomas Edison: A Quote
“The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand – without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it….”
I have not yet been able to locate where this came from — book, speech, interview, conversation — so I’ll have to go with “caveat emptor” for right now. The quote could be Edison, or it could be someone else, as far as I know…
February 17, 2009
Abraham Lincoln: A Quote Not His
Attributed to Lincoln, but falsely:
“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by encouraging class hatred.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your earn.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.”-Abraham Lincoln, 1859
When we look for a citation instead of passing this around willy-nilly, we find TruthorFiction.com which says:
These words are often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but according to the book They Never Said it: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions, they are not from Lincoln.
And Cincinnati Skeptics: The Association for Rational Thought which says:
February 16, 2009
Michael Crichton: A Quote
In “Why Speculate?” (a speech given to the International Leadership Forum in La Jolla, California, on April 26, 2002), Mr. Crichton says:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. … You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
January 28, 2009
Fancis Bacon: A Quote, 2
“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”
From p. 115 of the Second Book of The Advancement of Learning by Francis Bacon, ed. William Aldis Wright, M.A., Clarendon Press Series, pub. Henry Frowde, London, MacMillan and Co., New York, 1885 (MDCCCLXXXV), 3rd edition, revised. See also p. 219 of The Works of Francis Bacon.
January 22, 2009
Galileo: A Quote
Contra the Scholastics (and contra Bacon, from what I’ve heard of Bacon — though I’ll have to research on my own to see if Bacon made some of the malicious, ill-informed comments against Aristotle that I heard he did), Galileo says:
I should even think that in making the celestial material alterable, I contradict the doctrine of Aristotle much less than do those people who still want to keep the sky inalterable; for I am sure that he never took its inalterability to be as certain as the fact that all human reasoning must be placed second to direct experience.
From the Second Letter of Galileo Galilei to Mark Welser on Sunspots, p. 118 of Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, translated by Stillman Drake, (c) 1957 by Stillman Drake, published by Doubleday Anchor Books, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, New York.
Galileo’s sunspot letters to Mark Wesler can be found on Website of the Department of Astronomy of San Diegos State University.
January 11, 2009
Theodore Roosevelt: A Quote
A popular quote of Roosevelt‘s is:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
So what does that mean? Ideas don’t matter? (If you think that…then why does Roosevelt judge and measure action by “deeds,” “striving,” “causes,” and “devotion?”) Ideas are for action? Life goes to the living?
Caveat: I’m no fan of Roosevelt, and I don’t like what I know of his political philosophy and economic theory, but this quote makes a good point.
Columbus was such “doer of deeds:” he had defeats and victories, he gave sweat and blood, he knew enthusiasm and devotion, all for a cause. At PowellHistory.com, Mr. Scott Powell posts about a poem which he says “is the closest thing I have ever found to an objective assessment of Columbus’s place in history, and…is beautifully written.”
