Originals Quotes - Page 23

• If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take us as long to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. All recollected times undergo, accordingly, what M. Ribot calls foreshortening; and this foreshortening is due to the omission of an enormous number of facts which filled them.

  William James

  Thinking, Numbers, Space

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• Evil is a disease; and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which only adds to the original complaint.

  William James

  Evil, Worry, Add

  Dr. William James (2013). “The William James Reader”, p.401, Simon and Schuster

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• Most of the trades, professions, and ways of living among mankind, take their original either from the love of the pleasure, or the fear of want. The former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates into luxury, and the latter into avarice.

  Joseph Addison

  Work, Luxury, Way

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1852). “The Spectator”, p.65

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• Language fails not because thought fails, but because no verbal symbols can do justice to the fullness and richness of thought. Ifwe are to continue talking about "data" in any other sense than as reflective distinctions, the original datum is always such a qualitative whole.

  John Dewey

  Talking, Data, Justice

  John Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston, Paul Kurtz (2008). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1929-1930”, p.250, SIU Press

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• The world is forever babbling of originality; but there never yet was an original man, in the sense intended by the world; the first man himself--who according to the Rabbins was also the first author--not being an original; the only original author being God.

  Herman Melville

  God, Men, Forever

  Herman Melville (1971). “Pierre, Or The Ambiguities: Volume Seven, Scholarly Edition”, p.259, Northwestern University Press

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• ... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

  Elizabeth Bowen

  Writing, Past, Wish

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• It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people andstart them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Mistake, Talking, People

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• Original sin reassures us that our slip was not the first.

  Mason Cooley

  Firsts, Sin, Slips

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• Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.

  John Dos Passos

  Writing, Thinking, Discovery

  John Dos Passos (1988). “John Dos Passos: the major nonfictional prose”

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• Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

  Jean Baudrillard

  Moving, Assuming, Catastrophe

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• Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ..." [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves.

  Erica Jong

  Honesty, Nice, Writing

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• Cliche refers to words, commonplace to ideas. Cliche describes the form or the letter, commonplace the substance or spirit. To confuse them is to confuse the thought with the expression of the thought. The cliche is immediately perceivable; the commonplace very often escapes notice if decked out in original dress. There are few examples, in any literature, of new ideas expressed in original form. The most critical mind must often be content with one or the other of these pleasures, only too happy when it is not deprived of both at once, which is not too rarely the case.

  Remy de Gourmont

  Often Is, Expression, Ideas

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• When philosophers use a word--"knowledge," "being," "object," "I," "proposition," "name"--and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?--What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Home, Essence, Games

  Ludwig Wittgenstein (1973). “Philosophical investigations”

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• Man is not merely the sum of his masks. Behind the shifting face of personality is a hard nugget of self, a genetic gift.... The self is malleable but elastic, snapping back to its original shape like a rubber band. Mental illness is no myth, as some have claimed. It is a disturbance in our sense of possession of a stable inner self that survives its personae.

  Camille Paglia

  Men, Self, Personality

  Camille Paglia (2011). “Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays”, p.100, Vintage

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• The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.

  Thomas Hobbes

  Fear, Men, Lasting

  Thomas Hobbes, Bernard Gert (1972). “Man and Citizen: De Homine and De Cive”, p.113, Hackett Publishing

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• When we reflect on our past sentiments and affections, our thought is a faithful mirror, and copies its objects truly; but the colours which it employs are faint and dull, in comparison of those in which our original perceptions were clothed.

  David Hume

  Past, Mirrors, Faithful

  David Hume, Eric Steinberg (1992). “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; [with] A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh; [and] An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature”, p.10, Hackett Publishing

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• The Red Cross in its nature, it aims and purposes, and consequently, its methods, is unlike any other organization in the country.It is an organization of physical action, of instantaneous action, at the spur of the moment; it cannot await the ordinary deliberation of organized bodies if it would be of use to suffering humanity,[ellipsis in original] it has by its nature a field of its own.

  Clara Barton

  Country, Organization, Humanity

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• Why must ancients, and provided the same talent, be better than modern authors?
  Free to exploit the vast realm of the simpleand the natural, they did not have to be artificial in order to be original (which every artist aspires to be).

  Franz Grillparzer

  Art, Order, Poetry

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• Genius differs from talent not by the amount of original thoughts, but by making the latter fertile and by positioning them properly, in other words, by integrating everything into a whole, whereas talent produces only fragments, no matter how beautiful.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Beautiful, Integrity, Matter

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• Turning popular opinion upside down does not make an original.

  Franz Grillparzer

  Doe, Originality, Opinion

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• Today the separation of church and state is America is used to silence the church... The way the concept is used today is totally reversed from the original intent... It is used today as a false political dictum in order to restrict the influence of Christian ideas... To have suggested the state separated from religion and religious influence would have amazed the Founding Fathers.

  Francis Schaeffer

  Christian, Religious, Father

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• There is a crucial distinction to be made between innovation and originality. The second, unlike the first, can never break with what preceded it: to be original, an artist must also belong to the tradition from which he departs. To put it another way, he must violate the expectations of his audience, but he must also, in countless ways, uphold and endorse them.

  Roger Scruton

  Artist, Expectations, Innovation

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• Certainly the philosopher of 'possible worlds' must take care that his technical apparatus not push him to ask questions whose meaningfulness is not supported by our original intuitions of possibility that gave the apparatus its point.

  Saul Kripke

  Intuition, World, Care

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• An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings.

  Charlton Laird

  Moving, Two, Body

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• The original Upper Paleolithic people would, if they appeared among us today, be called Caucasoid, in the sense that they lacked the particular traits we associate with Negroid and Mongoloid types.

  Raymond Cattell

  People, Today, Type

  Raymond B. Cattell (1982). “Personality and learning theory: the structure of personality in its environment”

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