Merit Quotes - Page 28

• Nuclear Weapons merit unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation

  William Sloane Coffin

  Religious, Nuclear, Weapons

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• The discovery of the North Pole is one of those realities which could not be avoided. It is the wages which human perseverance pays itself when it thinks that something is taking too long. The world needed a discoverer of the North Pole, and in all areas of social activity, merit was less important here than opportunity.

  Karl Kraus

  Perseverance, Opportunity, Reality

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• A good thought is indeed a great boon, for which God is to be first thanked; next he who is the first to utter it, and then, in a lesser, but still in a considerable degree, the friend who is the first to quote it to us. Whoever adopts and circulates a just thought, participates in the merit that originated it.

  Christian Nestell Bovee

  Degrees, Next, Firsts

  Christian Nestell Bovee (1862). “Intuitions and Summaries of Thought”, p.169

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• I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Tea, Finals

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• Oh Beer! Oh Hodgson, Guinness, Allsop, Bass! Names that should be on every infant's tongue! Shall days and months and years and centuries pass, And still your merits be unrecked, unsung?

  Charles Stuart Calverley

  Beer, Years, Names

  Charles Stuart Calverley (1872). “Fly Leaves”, p.170

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• Faith is not in itself a meritorious act; the merit is in the One to Whom it is directed.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

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• Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.

  Timothy Keller

  Effort, Moral, Motivated

  Timothy Keller (2008). “The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism”, p.69, Penguin

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• The man that hails you Tom or Jack, and proves by thumps upon your back how he esteems your merit, is such a friend, that one had need be very much his friend indeed to pardon or to bear it.

  William Cowper

  Friendship, Men, Needs

  'Friendship' (1782) l. 169

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• Riches and power are but gifts of blind fate, whereas goodness is the result of one's own merits.

  Heloise

  Fate, Riches, Blind

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• Gaining maturity in yoga practice involves learning to respect the paths that other people are on and acknowledging their merits, maybe even acknowledging that your own path is lacking in some area where another one excels.

  Geeta Iyengar

  Yoga, Maturity, Practice

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• It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

  Julien Offray de La Mettrie

  Vices, Arbitrary, Rewards

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• The sage never seems to know his own merits, for only by not noticing them can you call others' attention to them.

  Baltasar Gracian

  Attention, Sage, Modesty

  Baltasar Gracian (2006). “The Art of Worldly Wisdom”, p.50, Shambhala Publications

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• When we are dead we are praised by those who survive us, though we frequently have no other merit than that of being no longer alive.

  Jean de la Bruyere

  Alive, Reputation

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• It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.

  Mark Twain

  Exaggeration Is, Humans, Exaggerating

  Mark Twain (2012). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations”, p.49, Courier Corporation

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• Love, all agreeable as it is, charms more by the fashion in which it displays itself, than by its own true merit.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Love, Fashion, Charm

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• There is merit without rank, but there is no rank without some merit.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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• Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

  George Eliot

  Neutrality, Saws, Abstract

  George Eliot (2016). “Middlemarch”, p.376, Xist Publishing

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• To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledge are those knowledge that idiots possess.

  William Blake

  Idiot, Distinction, Generalization

  "Annotations to The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds" (ca. 1798 - 1809)

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• Whatever we may say against collections, which present authors in a disjointed form, they nevertheless bring about many excellent results. We are not always so composed, so full of wisdom, that we are able to take in at once the whole scope of a work according to its merits. Do we not mark in a book passages which seem to have a direct reference to ourselves? Young people especially, who have failed in acquiring a complete cultivation of mind, are roused in a praiseworthy way by brilliant passages.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Book, People, Mind

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• There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar. In each case it is special knowledge.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Knowledge, Special, Able

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• This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.

  William Ernest Henley

  Art, Real, Essence

  William Ernest Henley, Robert Louis Stevenson (1908). “Views and reviews; essays in appreciation: I. Literature. II. Art”

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• Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

  Isaac D'Israeli

  Criticism

  "Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 149-52, Literary Character of Men of Genius, chapter VI, 1922.

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• A continual feast of commendation is only to be obtained by merit or by wealth: many are therefore obliged to content themselves with single morsels, and recompense the infrequency of their enjoyment by excess and riot, whenever fortune sets the banquet before them.

  Samuel Johnson

  Excess, Wealth, Praise

  Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson, Catherine Talbot (1825). “The Rambler: A Periodical Paper, Published in 1750, 1751, 1752”, p.329

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• Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Horse, Laughter, Fun

  Lord Chesterfield, David Roberts (2008). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.140, Oxford University Press

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• The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are?

  Alexander Pope

  Peculiar, Care, Goodness

  Alexander Pope (1777). “A collection of essays, episodes and odes”, p.35

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