“C” Quotations

(see also AUTOPSY and CORPSE and CRIME SCENE and DEATH & DYING and MURDER)

• Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life. Edward Abbey, on the works of Jane Austen, “On Writing and Writers, Books, and Art,” in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989)

• Cadavers and spirits are human refuse, and they are absurdly difficult to dispose of properly. When someone dies, a small gang of specialists is required to remove and inter the body in such a way that it can always be located precisely at any time while preventing it from ever appearing again. Michael Cisco, in The Traitor (2007)

• The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used. Andrea Dworkin, in Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 (1988)

• You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place. Mary Roach, in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2004)

In the book, Roach also wrote: “Sharing a room with a cadaver is only mildly different from being in a room alone. They are the same sort of company as people across from you on subways or in airport lounges, there but not there. Your eyes keep going back to them, for lack of anything more interesting to look at, and then you feel bad for staring.”

• For over 100 years the cadaver, that unsung hero of murder mysteries, has been accommodating, gracious and generally on time. There is no other figure in crime who has proved more reliable. Amor Towles, the opening words of “The Corpse in the Library,” in The New York Times (August 10, 2023)

In his opening paragraph, Towles continued: “Since the murder mystery first gained popularity, there have been two world wars, multiple economic crises, dance crazes and moonshots, the advent of radio, cinema, television and the internet. Ideas of right and wrong have evolved, tastes have changed. But through it all, the cadaver has shown up without complaint to do its job. A clock-puncher of the highest order, if you will.”

• Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. Robert Charles Wilson, in Spin (2010)

(see COFFEE)

(see also ANIMALS and ANIMAL RIGHTS and CAPTIVITY and FREEDOM and LIBERTY and NATURE and SLAVERY and ZOO)

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Maya Angelou, title of 1969 autobiography

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Angelou’s book—a fictionalized account of her early years—was borrowed from the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (see below)

• A robin redbreast in a cage/Puts all Heaven in a rage. William Blake, in “Auguries of Innocence” (1803)

QUOTE NOTE: Written in 1803, the poem was not published until 1863, when it appeared in a companion volume to Alexander Gilchrist’s biography The Life of William Blake.

• Our nation has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination . . . rationalized by an attitude of “romantic paternalism” which, in practical effect, put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage. William J. Brennan, in plurality opinion in Frontiero v. Richardson (1973)

• I know why the caged bird sings! Paul Dunbar, line from the poem “Sympathy,” in Lyrics of the Hearthside (copyright 1899; published 1902)

QUOTE NOTE: Maya Angelou borrowed this line from Dunbar’s poem for her 1969 autobiography (the complete poem and a brief analysis may be found at “Sympathy”. Most critics view Dunbar’s poem—and the concept of a caged bird—as a metaphor for people struggling to free themselves from racism and racial oppression, but Dunbar’s widow took a slightly different view. Writing in the A. M. E. Review in 1914, she wrote:

“The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!—a poet shut up with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.”

In employing the caged bird metaphor, Dunbar was almost certainly inspired by a line from John Webster’s 1612 play The White Devil (see the Webster entry below)

• The world goes by my cage and never sees me. Randall Jarrell, from the poem “The Woman at the Washington Zoo,” (1956, l. 20), in The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems & Translations (1960)

• Her beauty was sold/For an old man’s gold,/She’s a bird in a gilded cage. Arthur J. Lamb, lyric from the 1900 song Bird in a Gilded Cage (music by Harry Von Tilzer)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the key lyric to the most popular song of 1900. The song is also one of history’s most popular sentimental ballads, telling the sad story of a young beauty who marries for money rather than love. For more, including the entire set of lyrics, go to A Bird in a Gilded Cage.

• We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out. Michel de Montaigne, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” in Essays (1580–88)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is also an example of chiasmus (ky-AZ-mus). In an essay in Representative Men (1850), Ralph Waldo Emerson piggy-backed on Montaigne’s observation when he wrote (also chiastically): “Is not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, from the beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to get out, and such as are out wish to get in.”

• We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry. John Webster, the character Flamineo speaking, in The White Devil (1612)

• I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage. Tennessee Williams, the character Margaret (Maggie the Cat), speaking to husband Brick, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)

(see also ADVERSITY and CRISIS and DANGER and DEBACLE and DIFFICULTY and DISASTER and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and OBSTACLES and PROBLEMS and SORROW and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS and TROUBLE and SUFFERING)

• Calamity is man’s true touchstone. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, the character Martius speaking, in The Triumph of Honor (written c. 1610; published 1647)

• Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• Public calamity is a mighty leveler. Edmund Burke, in “Conciliation With America” speech in the House of Commons (March 22, 1775)

• Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• Divine Providence send the chiefest benefits under the mask of calamities. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in “The Fortune of the Republic,” speech at Boston’s Old South Church (March 30, 1878)

• I am thankful that in a troubled world no calamity can prevent the return of spring. Helen Keller, in a letter to Carrie Fuld (May 10, 1933); in To Love This Life: Quotations by Helen Keller (2000)

• It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. Benjamin E. Mays, “What a Man Lives By,” in Best Black Sermons (1972; E. M. Philpot, ed.)

• Necessity may well be called the mother of invention—but calamity is the test of integrity. Samuel Richardson, the title character speaking, in Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1748)

• Learn to see in another’s calamity the ills which you should avoid. Publilius Syrus, in Sententiae (1st c. B.C.)

(see also DESCRIPTION—OF PLACES and FLORIDA and NEW YORK STATE and TEXAS and UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—SPECIFIC STATES)

• California is once-and-future America, and much that is newest and biggest in this country, both its best and worst, is concentrated along our western edge. Shana Alexander, in Talking Woman (1976)

Alexander continued: “What is liveliest in America, most energetic, most dissatisfied with things-as-they-are, more ardent for things-as-they-might be has always tended to pile up along our Pacific shore.”

• Californians tend to be outspoken. When the great migration began, the more timid people must have stayed home, and the bolder ones headed west. Shana Alexander, in Anyone’s Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst (1979)

• Today it is the richest, most populous, looniest state, and a host of other superlatives, but above all it is first. Soothsayers once foretold the future by dropping molten gold into water. If we could drop the dogleg of California into water, we could forecast America. Shana Alexander, in Anyone’s Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst (1979)

Alexander continued: “The sun moves from east to west, but as every long-suffering California reporter knows, everything else in the United States moves in the opposite direction. What happens today in California turns up tomorrow in the Midwest and only then arrives in the decaying and moribund cities of the East.”

• Nearly all of our national fads and foibles, political trends, and social seizures seem to begin in California. They appear along the Pacific shoreline like salamanders crawling up onto the beaches out of the sunset’s fire to begin the trek. Eastward, ho! Shana Alexander, in Anyone’s Daughter: The Times and Trials of Patty Hearst (1979)

Alexander went on to add: “Consider hula hoops, bikini suits, skateboards, smog alerts, encounter groups, jogging, open sex, swinging singles, BankAmericards, Frisbees, McDonald’s, I Ching, Zen tennis, topless cocktails, and black power. Consider the taxpayers’ revolt—Proposition 13. Consider picture windows. Think of it! The very flesh and profile of today, all blooming first in the warm California sunshine! The place is prototypical America. The entire state is a series of stage sets, from the forced-perspective streets of San Francisco to the faded, painted backcloth of Los Angeles. The apparent unreality of California may be what is most real about it. The place is continually in the process of becoming, perpetually emergent, like a darkroom image developing in its chemical bath, and what is liveliest about America, most energetic, most dissatisfied with things-as-they-are, most ardent for things-as-they-might-be, most rootless, most forward-looking, most superficial, most contemporary, most independent, most existential, most flimsy, all piles up along our teeming western edge.”

• California’s a wonderful place to live—if you happen to be an orange. Fred Allen, in American Magazine (Dec., 1945)

• California, the last frontier, the goal of adventurers, desperadoes, nonconformists, fugitives from justice, undiscovered geniuses, impenitent sinners, and hopeless lunatics, a place where even today every possible formula for avoiding the anguish of living proliferates. Isabel Allende, the voice of the narrator, in The Infinite Plan (1991)

Allende continued: “There is something in the air of the place that agitates the spirit. Or maybe those who came to populate the region were in such a hurry to find their fortune—or easy oblivion—that their soul lagged behind, and they are still looking for it. Uncounted charlatans have profited from this phenomenon, offering magic formulas to fill the painful void left by the absent spirit.”

• I am a Californian, and we have twice the individuality and originality of any people in the United States. We always get quite huffy when we are spoken of as merely Americans. Gertrude Atherton, the character Lee speaking, in Transplanted (1919)

• California has all the beauties of youth as well as its idiocies and vices. Gertrude Atherton, the character Hélène speaking, in The Avalanche (1919)

• Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all. Gertrude Atherton, in The Adventures of a Novelist (1932)

• In California death is one of the most successfully kept secrets there is. If you doubt this, try to find a cemetery. Sheila Ballantyne, a reflection of the title character, in Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975)

• Californians are good at planning for the earthquake, while simultaneously denying it will happen. Sheila Ballantyne, “Letter to John Lennon,” in Life on Earth (1988)

• Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows. Stella Benson, the voice of the narrator, in The Poor Man (1923)

• Always there is a sort of dream of air between you and the hills of California, a veil of unreality in the intervening air. It gives the hills the bloom that peaches have, or grapes in the dew. Stella Benson, the voice of the narrator, in The Poor Man (1923)

A moment earlier, the narrator introduced the subject by writing: “Except for a lapse into greenness after the rains, California hills are always golden; sometimes rose-gold, sometimes lemon-gold.”

• California, more than any other part of the Union, is a country by itself, and San Francisco a capital. James Bryce, in The American Commonwealth, Vol. II (1888)

• A disaster in Florida is regarded in California in the same way that a disaster in Italy is regarded in Britain—as something briefly and morbidly diverting, but too far away to be tragic in any personal sense. Bill Bryson, in The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

• It’s a scientific fact that for every year you live in California, you lose two points off your I.Q. Truman Capote, a 1975 remark, quoted in the Jay Presson Allen play Tru (1989)

According to Allen, Capote continued: “It’s redundant to die in L.A.”

• In California everyone goes to a therapist, is a therapist, or is a therapist going to a therapist. Truman Capote, quoted in Fred Metcalf, The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations (1986)

• Whatever starts in California unfortunately has a tendency to spread. Jimmy Carter, remark at a cabinet meeting (March 21, 1977)

• California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Raymond Chandler, a reflection of protagonist Philip Marlowe, in The Little Sister (1949)

• California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension. Joan Didion, “Notes from a Native Daughter,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

About that sense of unease, Didion explained: “The mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”

• We Californians are constantly accused of not having seasons, but we do. We have fire, flood, mud, and drought. Phyllis Diller, in Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse (2005)

• The attraction and superiority of California are in its days. It has better days, and more of them, than any other country. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a journal entry (April-May 1871)

• California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935)

• People in California seem to age at a different rate than the rest of the country. Maybe it’s the passion for diet and exercise, maybe the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Or maybe we’re afflicted with such a horror of aging that we’ve halted the process psychically. Sue Grafton, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Kinsey Millhone, in “E” Is for Evidence (1988)

• I’m today’s hero of the love-and-flowers cult out in the Screwy State, so they tell me. Robert Graves on California, in Paris Review interview (Summer 1969)

• California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America. Hinton R. Helper, in Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction (1855)

• Californians are a race of people; they are not merely inhabitants of a state. O. Henry, “A Municipal Report,” in Strictly Business (1910)

He preceded the thought by writing: “East us East, and West is San Francisco, according to Californians.”

• California…is the place that sets the trends and establishes the values for the rest of the country; like a slow ooze, California culture spreads eastward across the land. Ada Louise Huxtable, in The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1993)

In her book, Huxtable also wrote: “Only a Californian would have observed that it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell the real fake from the fake fake.”

• California is a tragic country—like Palestine, like every Promised Land. Christopher Isherwood, “Los Angeles,” in Horizon magazine (1947); reprinted in Exhumations (1966)

Isherwood continued: “Its short history is a fever-chart of migrations—the land rush, the gold rush, the oil rush, the movie rush, the Okie fruit-picking rush, the wartime rush to the aircraft factories—followed, in each instance, by counter-migrations of the disappointed and unsuccessful, moving sorrowfully homeward.”

• California reminds me of the popular American Protestant concept of heaven: there is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals. George F. Kennan, journal entry (May 13, 1956), in Sketches From a Life (1989)

Kennan added: “One meets many—not all—of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating one another about the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable.”

• There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white, like washlines, and emptyheaded. Jack Kerouac, in On the Road (1957)

• California is a queer place—in a way, it has turned its back on the world, and looks into the void Pacific. It is absolutely selfish, very empty, but not false, and at least, not full of false effort. D. H. Lawrence, in letter to J. Middleton Murry (September 24, 1923)

Lawrence added: “I don’t want to live here, but a stay here rather amuses me. It’s sort of crazy-sensible.”

• When a tree takes a notion to grow in California nothing in heaven or on earth will stop it. Lilian Leland, in Travelling Alone: A Woman's Journey Round the World (1890)

• What does a Californian make for dinner? Reservations. Maureen Lipman, in How Was It for You? (1985)

• As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit southern California to observe the future.” Alison Lurie, a reflection of protagonist Paul Cattleman, in The Nowhere City (1966)

• There was nothing wrong with California that a rise in the ocean wouldn’t cure. Ross MacDonald, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Lew Archer, in The Drowning Pool (1950)

QUOTE NOTE: This is one of MacDonald’s most popular observations, but few know the backstory. As Lew Archer was taking a swim in his beloved Pacific ocean, he was thinking about the environmental havoc that had been wrought in California. He preceded the observation above by thinking: “I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean.”

• California, that advance post of our civilization, with its huge aircraft factories, TV and film studios, automobile way of life…its flavorless cosmopolitanism, its charlatan philosophies and religions, its lack of anything old and well-tried, rooted in tradition and character. J.P. Priestley, “They Come From Inner Source Space,” in Thoughts in the Wilderness (1957

• I am struck in California by the deep and almost religious affection which people have for nature, and by the sensitiveness they show to its influences; not merely poetically, but also athletically, because they like to live as nature lives. George Santayana, in letter to Porter Garnett (Aug. 15, 1911)

• Satan, from one of his elevations, showed mankind the kingdom of California, and they entered into a compact with him at once. Henry David Thoreau, in a journal entry about the discovery of gold in California ((Feb. 2, 1852)

• On Venice Beach…I once saw a man blowing truly spectacular soap bubbles the size of watermelons—still the symbol for me of the tendency of people in Southern California to become awfully good at something that isn’t terribly important. Calvin Trillin, in Travels with Alice (1989)

• All scenery in California requires distance to give it charm. Mark Twain, in Roughing It (1872)

• All Californians travel toward water; toward the sea; once toward the rivers; now toward the rivers impounded and called lakes; toward snow, which is frozen water. Jessamyn West, in Hide and Seek: A Continuing Journey (1973)

West continued: “And even when Californians head toward the desert, they do so more to marvel at the presence of swimming pools and fountains than to play in the sand.”

• California is an Italy without its art. Oscar Wilde, quoted in The Denver Tribune (April, 1882)

• Southern California, I found, is a veritable paradise of statuspheres. Tom Wolfe, in The Pump House Gang (1968)

Wolfe continued: “For example, the move to age segregation. There are old people’s housing developments, private developments in which no one under 50 may buy a home. There are apartment developments for single persons 20 to 30 only. The Sunset Strip in Los Angeles has become the exclusive hangout of the 16 to 25 set.”

• If you turned the country on its side, everything loose would fall into Southern California. Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted by Herb Caen in his San Francisco Chronicle column (Aug. 6, 1978)

QUOTE NOTE: This became something of a signature line for Wright. One other oft-quoted version is: “From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn’t fastened down slides into Southern California.”

(see also CAREER and PROFESSION and VOCATION and WORK)

• Your calling is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner, in The Hungering Dark (1969)

Buechner introduced the thought by writing: “The world is full of people who seem to have listened to the wrong voice and are now engaged in life work in which they find no pleasure or purpose and who run the risk of suddenly realizing someday that they have spent the only years they are ever going to get in this world doing something which could not matter less to themselves or to anyone else.”

(see also COMPOSURE and PEACE & PEACEFULNESS and PLACID & PLACIDITY and SERENITY and STILLNESS and TRANQUILITY)

• There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. Willa Cather, in The Song of the Lark (1915)

• You must learn to be still in the midst of activity, and to be vibrantly alive in moments of calm. Indira Gandhi, in Freedom Is the Starting Point (1976)

• They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm. Dorothy Parker, “Fair Weather,” in Sunset Gun (1928)

• First of my own personal requirements is inner calm. This, I think, is an essential. Eleanor Roosevelt, in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life (1960)

Roosevelt continued: “One of the secrets of using your time well is to gain a certain ability to maintain peace within yourself so that much can go on around you and you can stay calm inside.”

• At night, time becomes a calm sea. It goes on for ever. Françoise Sagan, in Nightbird: Conversations With Françoise Sagan (1974)

(see ART and FILM and PAPARAZZI and PHOTOGRAPHY and PICTURES)

• The camera is a kind of license. Diane Arbus, in Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972; Doon Arbus & Marvin Israel, eds.)

QUOTE NOTE: A few years later, in Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), Arbus was quoted as saying: “Photography was a license to go wherever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.”

• The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking. Brooks Atkinson, “August 28,” in Once Around the Sun (1951)

• The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Revelation” (1935), in Illuminations (1968; Hannah Arendt, ed.)

• The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other God has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. John Berger, “Uses of Photography,” in About Looking (1980)

• The camera can photograph thought. It’s better than a paragraph of sweet polemic. Dirk Bogarde, quoted in The Independent (London; Jan. 28, 1990)

• The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth. Harold Evans, in Good Times, Bad Times (1983)

• A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar—you pretend it’s not there. Darryl Hannah, quoted in a 1990 issue of Vanity Fair (specific issue undetermined)

• So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful. Susan Sontag, “The Heroism of Vision,” in On Photography (1977)

• The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own. Susan Sontag, “Melancholy Objects,” in On Photography (1977)

• The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied. Susan Sontag, “The Image World,” in On Photography (1977)

• I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything. John Steinbeck, in letter to Robert O. Ballou (June 10, 1932); reprinted in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (1975; E. Steinbeck & R. Wallsten, eds.)

• A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet. Orson Welles, a 1960 remark, quoted in Peter A. Cowie, A Ribbon of Dreams: The Cinema of Orson Welles (1973)

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Cowie’s book was taken from a 1969 Welles remark quoted in London’s Observer: “A film, besides being a ribbon of celluloid, is a ribbon of dreams.”

(see ART and ARTISTS and CULTURE and EXAGGERATION and IRONY and KITSCH and STYLE)

• Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is love of the exaggerated. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Partisan Review (Fall, 1964); reprinted in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966)

QUOTE NOTE: The American Heritage Dictionary defines camp as “Deliberate affectation or exaggeration of style, especially of popular or outdated style, for ironic or humorous effect: The word has its origins in the French expression se camper, meaning “to pose in an exaggerated fashion.”

(see also HIKING and OUTDOORS and NATURE and MOUNTAINS and [National] PARKS and PICNIC and WILDERNESS)

• During camping, cleanliness is at best an approximation. Bill (not “the Science Guy”) Nye, quoting his friend Andrew Heunis, who was attempting to wash the fine mountain dust off his hands during a 1980s camping trip in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

• The promotion from all-day picnics to a two weeks’ camping-trip is like going from school to college. Henry Van Dyke, “A Leaf of Spearmint, III,” in Little Rivers (1895)

(see also AMERICA & AMERICANS and ENGLAND & THE ENGLISH and other nations & their citizens, including China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia; see also NATIONS OF THE WORLD—N. E. C.)

• If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia. Margaret Atwood, in The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

• Americans don’t usually have to think about Canadian-American relations, or, as they would put it, American-Canadian relations. Why think about something which you believe affects you so little? We, on the other hand, have to think about you whether we like it or not. Margaret Atwood, “Canadian-American Relations: Surviving the Eighties,” in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose (1982)

• The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not “Am I really that oppressed?” but “Am I really that boring?” Margaret Atwood, in Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990; Earl G. Ingersoll, ed.)

• The beginning of Canadian cultural nationalism was not “Am I really that oppressed?” but “Am I really that boring?” Margaret Atwood, quoted in Earl G. Ingersoll, Margaret Atwood: Conversations (1990)

• I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch Banker. Robertson Davies, “The Table Talk of Robertson Davies,” in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990)

Earlier in the piece, Davies had written: “Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.”

• The air and the sky seem to have been freshly washed and polished, and the people too. Marlene Dietrich, on Canada, in Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (1962)

• Canada has never been a melting pot; more like a tossed salad. Arnold Edinborough, quoted in Laurence J. Peter, Quotations for Our Time (1978)

• To enter the United States is a matter of crossing an ocean; to enter Canada is a matter of being silently swallowed by an alien continent. Northrop Frye, in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (1971)

Frye preceded the observation by writing: “The traveler from Europe edges into it like a tiny Jonah entering an inconceivably large whale, slipping past the straits of Belle Isle into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where five Canadian provinces surround him, for the most part invisible. Then he goes up the St. Lawrence and the inhabited country comes into view, mainly a French-speaking country with its own cultural traditions.”

• In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations—it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir. J. Stuart Keate, publisher of The Vancouver Sun, quoted in John Robert Colombo, Colombo’s Canadian Quotations (1974)

• If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography. William Lyon Mackenzie King, on Canada, in speech to Canadian House of Commons (June 18, 1936)

• Canadians look down at the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante’s scheme, Limbo is to Hell. Irving Layton, “Obs II,” in The Whole Bloody Bird (1969)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites and many respected quotation anthologies present the phrase look down on rather than the correct look down at.

• Canadians are Americans with no Disneyland. Margaret Mahy, the character Laura speaking, in The Changeover: A Supernatural Romance (1984)

• Canada is a country where nothing seems ever to happen. A country always dressed in its Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. A country you wouldn’t ask to dance a second waltz. Clean. Christian. Dull. Quiescent. But growing. Yes, it must be admitted, the Dominion is growing. Carol Shields, in The Stone Diaries (1994)

• Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt. Pierre Trudeau, on Canada’s relationship to the USA, in remarks at Washington, DC Press Club (March 25, 1969)

• Canada is bounded on the north by gold; on the west by the East; on the east by history; and on the south by friends. Frances Shelley Wees, in “Geography Lesson,” cited in a 1960 ALA Bulletin (Vol. 54)

QUOTE NOTE: It’s possible that Wees was inspired by Philip Guedalla’s famous definition of biography (to be found in Biography & Biographers).

(see also CANCER [FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS] and CANCER METAPHORS and DEATH & DYING and DISEASE and DOCTORS and HEALING and ILLNESS and MEDICINE and RECOVERY and SICKNESS)

• Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Edward Abbey, a 1969 remark, quoted in Les Standiford, “Desert Places: An Exchange with Edward Abbey,” in Western Humanities Review (Autumn, 1970); reprinted as “Arizona: How Big is Enough?” in One Life at a Time, Please (1986)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the original source for Abbey’s most widely quoted observation (Standiford said his article was “assembled from correspondence with the author in 1969”). Abbey preceded the observation by writing: “The religion of endless growth—like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason—is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease. And the one disease to which the growth mania bears an exact analogical resemblance is cancer.” He then concluded the ideology thought by writing: “Cancer has no purpose but growth; but it does have another result—the death of the host.”

• We “need” cancer because, by the very fact of its incurability, it makes all other diseases, however virulent, not cancer. Gilbert Adair, “Under the Sign of Cancer,” in Myths and Memories (1986)

• Nobody knows what the cause is,/Though some pretend they do;/It’s like some hidden assassin/Waiting to strike at you. W. H. Auden, in the poem “Miss Gee” (1938), in Another Time (1940)

The poem continued: “Childless women get it,/And men when they retire;/It's as if there had to be some outlet/For their foiled creative fire.”

• A cancer is not only a physical disease, it is a state of mind. Michael M. Baden, quoted in The New York Times (June 17, 1979)

• Cancer is such a ruthless adversary because it behaves as if it has its own fiendishly cunning agenda. Paul Davies, “Cancer Can Teach Us About Our Own Evolution,” in The Guardian (Nov. 18,2012)

Davies, a physicist and science writer, continued: “Cancer cells come pre-programmed to execute a well-defined cascade of changes, seemingly designed to facilitate both their enhanced survival and their dissemination through the bloodstream. There is even an air of conspiracy in the way that tumors use chemical signals to create cancer-friendly niches in remote organs.”

• Fear of cancer is a fear of the unknown. It is a mysterious blackness with a ghoul’s name and a sadist’s reputation. Marion Hilliard, in A Woman Doctor Looks at Love and Life (1957)

• Cancer cells behave like the members of a barbarian horde run amok—leaderless and undirected, but with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach. Sherwin B. Nuland, in How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (1993)

• Cancer is a demonic pregnancy. Susan Sontag, in Illness as a Metaphor (1978)

• Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Norman Mailer, the character Stephen Rojack speaking, in An American Dream (1965)

Rojack added: “Cancer is the growth of madness denied.”

(see also CANCER and CANCER METAPHORS and DEATH & DYING and DISEASE and DOCTORS and HEALING and ILLNESS and MEDICINE and RECOVERY and SICKNESS)

• When you hear the word cancer, it’s as if someone took the game of Life and tossed it in the air. All the pieces go flying. The pieces land on a new board. Everything has shifted. Regina Brett, “Lesson 2: Get Busy on the Possible,” in Be the Miracle: 50 Lessons for Making the Impossible Possible (2012)

Brett was writing about her diagnosis of stage II breast cancer in 1998. She went on to write: “When you have cancer, it’s like you enter a new time zone: the Cancer Zone. Everything in the Tropic of Cancer revolves around your health or your sickness. I didn’t want my whole life to revolve around cancer. Life came first; cancer came second. So I came up with a game plan: Celebrate life in the midst of cancer.”

• I have been attacked by a nuisance of a cancer. My veins are filled, once a week with a Neapolitan carpet cleaner distilled from the Adriatic and I am bald as an egg. John Cheever, on his cancer treatment, in letter to Philip Roth (May 10, 1982); reprinted in The Letters of John Cheever (1989)

Cheever continued: “However I still get around and am mean to cats.”

• Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Christopher Hitchens, “Topic of Cancer,” in Vanity Fair (Sep, 2010)

QUOTE NOTE: On the detection of his esophageal cancer, Hitchens went on: “My father had died, and very swiftly too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was seventy-nine. I am sixty-one. In whatever kind of ‘race’ life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.” Hitchen’s essay on the cancer that resulted in his death at age 62 in 2011 contains many memorable observations—and many of the best were expressed metaphorically. See the full essay at Topic of Cancer.

• Having breast cancer is massive amounts of no fun. First they mutilate you; then they poison you; then they burn you. I have been on blind dates better than that. Molly Ivins, “Who Needs Breasts, Anyway?” in Time magazine (Feb. 18, 2002)

• I’m the only topless octogenarian in Washington. Alice Roosevelt Longworth, remark after her double mastectomy, quoted in Michael Teague, Mrs. L.: Conversations With Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1981)

• I think of my illness as a school, and I’ve finally I’ve graduated. Gilda Radnor, quoted in a 1988 issue of Life magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• All of a sudden I’ve become a member in an elite club that I'd rather not belong to. Gilda Radner, remark to Alan Zweibel, in Zweibel’s Bunny, Bunny: Gilda Radner, A Sort of Romantic Comedy (1994)

• Like any of life’s refining fires, cancer is a potentially profound learning experience. So what did I learn? I learned that profound learning experiences are vastly overrated. Jomi Rodgers, in Bald in the Land of Big Hair (2001)

(see also CANCER and CANCER [FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNTS] and DEATH & DYING and DISEASE and DOCTORS and HEALING and ILLNESS and MEDICINE and RECOVERY and SICKNESS)

(see also metaphors involving ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CHESS, CONJUGATION, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, HEART, JOURNEYS, MOTHERS, PARTS OF SPEECH, PATHS, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, SAILING & NAUTICAL, VEGETABLES, AND WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

• I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed, that the president himself would be killed by it. John Dean, in testimony before the U. S. Senate Watergate Committee (June 25, 1973)

QUOTE NOTE: This is what Dean famously said to the Watergate Committee. The so-called Watergate Tapes—made from recording devices secretly installed in the Oval Office—captured his exact words. In a March 21, 1973 meeting with President Nixon, Dean began by saying: “We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing.”

• Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Strength to Love (1963)

Dr, King added this lovely example of Double Chiasmus: “Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”

• That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away at the soul of our nation. George McGovern, on the Vietnam War

• Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer about the progress of his disease. Jay McInerney, in Brightness Falls (1985)

• The cancer of jealousy on the breast can never wholly be cut out, if I am to believe great masters of the healing art. Jean Paul Richter, in Hesperus (1795)

(see also BRIGHTNESS and DARKNESS and DARKNESS & LIGHT and DAWN and DAYLIGHT and ILLUMINATION and LIGHT and LIGHT BULB and SHADOW and SUNSHINE and WICK)

(see also metaphors involving ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CHESS, CONJUGATION, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, HEART, JOURNEYS, MOTHERS, PARTS OF SPEECH, PATHS, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, SAILING & NAUTICAL, VEGETABLES, AND WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

• I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out. Apocrypha—II Esdras 14:25

• Ritual is the act of sanctifying action—even ordinary actions—so that it has meaning: I can light a candle because I need the light or because the candle represents the light I need. Christina Baldwin, in Life's Companion, Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest (1990)

• We all think we’re too important to be snuffed out like candles, and probably that’s how the idea of immortality originated. Dorothy Müller Bowick, in Tapestry of Death (1973)

• Colors seen by candle-light/Will not look the same by day. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “The Lady’s ‘Yes,’” Poems (1844)

• As a white candle/In a holy place,/So is the beauty/Of an aged face. Joseph Campbell, from 1913 poem “The Old Woman,” in H. Monroe, The New Poetry (1917)

• Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind. Alice Childress, “A Candle in a Gale Wind,” in Mari Evans, Black Women Writers (1950-1980) (1984)

• If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it. Margaret Fuller, quoted in Elbert Hubbard’s Scrap Book (1923)

• Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out. Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005)

Gladwell preceded the thought by writing: “As human beings, we are capable of extraordinary leaps of insight and instinct. We can hold a face in memory, and we can solve a puzzle in a flash. But…all these abilities are incredibly fragile.”

• I began to recognize that death was indeed a part of life; that dying was merely the blowing out of the candle that was lit at birth. Tasha Halpert, “Death is a Part of Life,” in The Grafton News (Grafton, MA; Sep. 2, 2015)

• To light a candle is to cast a shadow. Ursula K. Le Guin, in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

• To see a candle’s light, one must take it into a dark place. Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Farthest Shore (1972)

• Absence lessens the minor passions and increases the great ones, as the wind douses a candle and kindles a fire. François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, in Maximes (1665)

QUOTE NOTE: La Rochefoucauld, the most famous of all French aphorists, usually gets credit for this sentiment, but he may have been inspired by a similar analogy in Histoire amoureuse des Gaules (1665) by Roger de Bussy-Rabutin. In a section on “Maxims of Love,” he wrote: “Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.”

• The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness. Carson McCullers, “The Orphanage,” in Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1988)

• My candle burns at both ends;/It will not last the night;/But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—/It gives a lovely light! Edna St. Vincent Millay, “First Fig,” in A Few Figs From Thistles (1920)

• Imparting knowledge is only lighting other men’s candles at our lamp, without depriving ourselves of any flame. Jane Porter, in Aphorisms of Sir Philip Sidney, With Remarks by Miss Porter (1807)

• The old faiths light their candles all about,/But burly Truth comes by and blows them out. Lizette Woodworth Reese, “Truth,” in Selected Poems (1927)

• The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Carl Sagan, title of 1995 book

• I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. George Bernard Shaw, “Art and Public Money,” in Sussex Daily News (March 7, 1907)

Shaw preceded the thought by saying: “I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.”

QUOTE NOTE: The brief candle phrase above as an allusion to—and an absolute rejection of—an idea contained in Macbeth’s famous lament about life: “Out, out brief candle.” That line from Macbeth, by the way, preceded one of Shakespeare’s most famous metaphors, the one beginning Life’s but a walking shadow.

• It seems to me you lived your life/like a candle in the wind. Bernie Taupin, on Marilyn Monroe, lyric in the 1973 song “Candle in the Wind” (music by Elton John)

• There are two ways of spreading light; to be/The candle or the mirror that reflects it. Edith Wharton, in the poem “Vesalius in Zante (1564)” (1902)

The verse continued: “I let my wick burn out—there yet remains/To spread an answering surface to the flame/That others kindle.”

• Yet it is far better to light the candle than to curse the darkness. W. L. Watkinson, “The Invincible Strategy,” in The Supreme Conquest: and Other Sermons Preached in America (1907)

QUOTE NOTE/ERROR ALERT: This appears to be the very first appearance of a saying that went on to become a modern proverb after The Christophers, a Catholic religious society, adopted it as a motto in 1945 (in the form: It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness). Some reputable reference sources have identified Father James Keller, founder of the Christophers, as the author of the sentiment, and it is true that he did write something very similar in his 1948 book You Can Change the World: “A Christopher spends his time improving, not disapproving, because he knows that ‘it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.’” [italics in original] Keller believed he was citing “an ancient Chinese Proverb,” but that does not appear to be the case. Watkinson (1838–1925), a popular English preacher who ultimately became president of England’s Wesleyan Methodist Conference, should be credited as the author of the sentiment. Watkinson visited America as the nineteenth century drew to a close, preaching sermons at a number of American Methodist churches.

(included [Being] CANDID and CANDIDNESS; see also BLUNTNESS and FRANKNESS and HONESTY and RUDENESS and SINCERITY and TRUTHFULNESS)

• Give me the avow’d, the erect, the manly foe,/Bold I can meet—perhaps may turn his blow;/But of all plagues, good heaven, thy wrath can send,/Save, save, oh! save me from the Candid Friend! George Canning, from “New Morality” (1898), in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (1801)

• There are very few honest friends—the demand is not particularly great. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880-93)

• Candor is a compliment; it implies equality. It’s how true friends talk. Peggy Noonan, in What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era (1990)

• Candor is always a double-edged sword; it may heal or it may separate. Wilhelm Stekel, in Marriage at the Crossroads (1931)

• Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities. Germaine de Staël, in De L’Allemagne (1813)

• How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor. Walt Whitman, in Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)

(includes CONFECTIONS; see also CANDY—SPECIFIC TYPES and CHOCOLATE and DESSERT and SWEETS)

• Candy/Is dandy/But liquor/Is quicker. Ogden Nash, in “Reflection on Ice-Breaking” (1931)

(see also CANDY and CHOCOLATE and DESSERT and SWEETS)

• It is the eggness of them. A shell, chocolate placenta, proteiny peanut baby. Life shape, birth shape, cell shape, protoplasmic-ooze shape. A shape that calls straight through civilization to our reptilian brains. Cynthia Heimel, on peanut M&Ms, in a 1986 column in The Village Voice (specific issue undetermined)

(see also BUSINESS and CAPITALISM & COMMUNISM and CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM and COMMUNISM & COMMUNISTS and ECONOMICS and FREEDOM and GOVERNMENT and IDEOLOGY and MARKETS and POLITICS and SOCIALISM & SOCIALISTS and STOCK MARKET and WALL STREET)

• Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell. Frank Borman, quoted in Forbes magazine (June 8, 1981)

• History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom (1962)

• Clarity and perseverance are difficult in American society because the basis of capitalism is greed and dissatisfaction. Natalie Goldberg, in Wild Mind: Living the Writer’s Life (1990)

• Capitalism undoubtedly has certain boils and blotches upon it, but has it as many as government? Has it as many as marriage? Has it as many as religion? I doubt it. It is the only basic institution of modern man that shows any genuine health and vigor. H. L. Mencken, in American Mercury magazine (Aug., 1928)

QUOTE NOTE: Fourteen months later, the American stock market collapsed, precipitating the Great Depression.

• Capitalism without failure is like religion without hell. Charlie Munger, quoted in Tao of Charlie Munger (2017, David Clark, ed.)

• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber, title of book

QUOTE NOTE: Weber’s book, considered a foundational work in the newly-emerging field of sociology, began as a series of articles written in 1904 and 1905. It first appeared in English as a 1930 book, translated from the German by Talcott Parsons.

(see also CAPITALISM & CAPITALISTS and CAPITALISM & SOCIALISM and COMMUNISM & COMMUNISTS and ECONOMICS and FREEDOM and SOCIALISM & SOCIALISTS)

• Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism—is vice versa. Daniel Bell, quoting a “wry Polish intellectual,” in Introduction to The End of Ideology (1960)

QUOTE NOTE: Even though Bell clearly said he was quoting someone else, most quotation anthologies and internet sites attribute the observation directly to him.

(see also CAPITALISM & CAPITALISTS and CAPITALISM & COMMUNISM and COMMUNISM & COMMUNISTS and ECONOMICS and FREEDOM and SOCIALISM & SOCIALISTS)

• The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries. Winston Churchill, in House of Commons speech (Oct. 22, 1945)

(includes DEATH PENALTY; see also CRIME and MURDER and PUNISHMENT)

• If we are to abolish the death penalty, I should like to see the first step taken by my friends the murderers. Alphonse Karr, in Les Guêpes (Jan. 31, 1849)

• If I do not speak out and resist, I am an accomplice. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., on her opposition to the death penalty, in Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (1993)

(see also BENEVOLENCE and CAREGIVERS & CAREGIVING and CHARITY and GENEROSITY and GIFTS and GIVING and GOODNESS and KINDNESS & UNKINDNESS)

• You are free only when you care for nobody in the world. But if you stop caring, life isn’t worth living. Martha Albrand, in Nightmare in Copenhagen (1954)

• One must learn to care for oneself first, so that one can then dare to care for someone else. Maya Angelou, quoted in Jeffrey M. Elliot, “Maya Angelou: A Search of Self,” in Negro History Bulletin (1977; specific issue undetermined )

Angelou added: “That’s what it takes to make the caged bird sing.”

• People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Author Unknown

QUOTE NOTE: This sentiment—a famous example of chiasmus—has been offered in a number of slightly varying forms by Maya Angelou, Stephen Covey, John Maxwell, Zig Ziglar, and many others (I’ve even seen it attributed to Theodore Roosevelt!). The original author, however, remains unknown. The earliest version of the saying I’ve been able to find appeared in an April 3, 1970 political advertisement in the Grand Prairie Daily News (Grand Prairie, Texas), when mayoral candidate Joe W. Colwell proclaimed to voters: “No one cares how much you know, but everyone knows how much you care. I care about Grand Prairie.”

A few months later, a July 2, 1970 issue of the Provo [Utah] Daily Herald quoted a speaker at a local Hospital Auxiliary as saying that one of her favorite sayings was: “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.” By the mid-70s, the saying was in common currency—most often in the form People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care—and by the end of the decade it was even being referred to as “an old saying.”

• What’s a codependent? The answer’s easy. They’re some of the most loving, caring people I know. Melody Beattie, in Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself (1987)

• Parents don’t make mistakes because they don’t care, but because they care so deeply. T. Berry Brazelton, in Touchpoints: Your Child’s Emotional and Behavioral Development (1992)

• Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. H. Jackson Brown, Jr., in Life’s Instructions for Wisdom, Success, and Happiness (2000)

• People who care for you inevitably become beautiful. Rita Mae Brown, A reflection of narrator and protagonist Nickel Smith, in Bingo (1988)

• Too often, we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. Leo Buscaglia, in a 1993 issue of Reader’s Digest (specific issue undetermined)

• To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but all the same…one would not be without that experience. Agatha Christie, the character Laura Welman speaking, in Sad Cypress (1940)

Mrs. Welman continued: “Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.”

• We’re here to use our intelligence, yes, but that ain’t everything. It’s our duty to see through things, but also to see things through. Or I’ll put it another way. We're not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through. Peter De Vries, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Stanley Waltz, in Let Me Count the Ways (1965)

QUOTE NOTE: The final portion has become almost a signature saying for De Vries. Note the two separate examples of chiasmus in the full observation.

• Of Course—I prayed—/And did God Care? Emily Dickinson, a circa 1862 poem fragment, quoted in Thomas H. Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)

• You can teach someone who cares to write columns, but you can’t teach someone who can write columns to care. Ellen Goodman, offered in interview with Gary Provost, from “Ellen Goodman” chapter, in Bill Strickland’s On Being a Writer (1992)

• When peoples [sic] care for you and cry for you, they can straighten out your soul. Langston Hughes, the character Simple speaking, from the short story “Last Whipping,” in Simple Takes a Wife (1953)

QUOTE NOTE: When the sentiment was adapted for the 1957 Broadway musical Simply Heavenly, Simple said to a friend: “When peoples care for you and cry for you—and love you—Joyce, they can straighten out your soul.”

• The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people. Helen Keller, “Try Democracy,” in a 1935 issue of The Home Magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• Care is a state in which something does matter; it is the source of human tenderness. Rollo May, quoted in Lloyd Cory, Quote Unquote (1977)

• Caring is the only daring. Kenneth Patchen, in What Shall We Do Without Us? The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen (1984)

• Too many of us stay walled up because we are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all. Eleanor Roosevelt, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s Book of Common Sense Etiquette (1962)

• The way a man looks at himself in a mirror will tell you if he can ever care about anyone else. Rita Rudner, IN Rita Rudner’s Guide to Men (1994)

• Caring can cost a lot, but not caring always costs more. Merle Shain, in When Lovers Are Friends (1978)

• Home is a symbol of the self. Caring for a home is caring for one's self. Gloria Steinem, in My Life on the Road (2015)

• Not listening is probably the commonest unkindness of married life, and one that creates—more devastatingly than an eternity of forgotten birthdays and misguided Christmas gifts—an atmosphere of not loving and not caring. Judith Viorst, in Yes, Married (1972)

• We love those we feed, not vice versa; in caring for others we nourish our own self esteem. Jessamyn West, in The Life I Really Lived (1979)

West continued: “Children are dependent upon adults. It’s a craven role for a child. It’s very natural to want to bite the hand that feeds you.”

(see also BENEVOLENCE and CARE & CARING and CHARITY and GENEROSITY and GIFTS and GIVING and GOODNESS and HELPERS & HELPING and KINDNESS & UNKINDNESS)

• Caregiving leaves its mark on us. No matter what we do to prepare ourselves the hole left behind looms large. Dale L. Baker, in More Than I Could Ever Know: How I Survived Caregiving (2014)

• There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers. Rosalyn Carter, quoting an unnamed caregiver, in Helping Yourself Help Others: A Book for Caregivers (orig. ed. 1994, revised 2013; with Susan K. Golant)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly attribute the quotation directly to the former First Lady.

• No disease should be allowed to have as its victims both the patient and the caregiver. But that is exactly what is happening every minute of every day [with Alzheimer’s]. Meryl Comer, in Slow Dancing With a Stranger: Lost and Found in the Age of Alzheimer’s (2014)

• For some caregivers, this role offers a chance in Second Adulthood to compose a more tender sequel to the troubled drama of our First Adulthoood. We can become better than our younger selves. Gail Sheehy, in Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence (2011)

• The secret of caregiving success took me years to discover. Quite simply, we cannot do it alone. No one can. We must create a support circle—a circle of care. Gail Sheehy, in Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence (2011)

• The caregiver’s journey…does not proceed from stage to stage in a neat fashion. It is definitely not linear. It feels like we are going around in circles, thinking we have resolved a crisis only to have it return or be superseded by a different, unexpected crisis. Gail Sheehy, in Passages in Caregiving: Turning Chaos Into Confidence (2011)

• Caregiving often calls us to lean into love we didn’t know possible. Tia Walker, “Journey of a Caregiver—Tia’s Story,” in Peggi Spears and Tia Walker, The Inspired Caregiver: Finding Joy While Caring for Those You Love (2013)

(see also CALLING and EMPLOYMENT and JOB and PROFESSION and PURSUIT and VOCATION and WORK)

• People don’t choose their careers; they are engulfed by them. John Dos Passos, quoted in The New York Times (Oct. 25, 1959)

• The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness—whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or songs. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Considerations by the Way,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• Careers, like rockets, don’t always take off on time. The trick is to always keep the engine running. Gary Sinise, quoted on Internet Movie Database (IMDb), date undetermined.

(see also CARTOONS and LAMPOON and PARODY and RIDICULE and SATIRE)

• A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than reality itself. Annibale Carracci, quoted in Philip Kennedy, “Al Hirschfeld: Broadway’s King of Caricature,” an undated post on www.illustrationchronicles.com

QUOTE NOTE: In his post, Kennedy suggests that caricature is an eponym, traced back to the Italian Baroque painter Annibale Carracci (1560–1609). So far, I’ve been unable to confirm his contention.

The word caricature derives from the Italian caricare, meaning “to charge or load.” A caricature, then, may be seen as a “loaded image.” An early use of the term in English appeared in Thomas Browne’s Christian Morals, published posthumously in 1716, where he wrote: “When Men's faces are drawn with resemblance to some other Animals, the Italians call it, to be drawn in Caricatura.”

• Parodies and caricatures are the most penetrating of criticisms. Aldous Huxley, the voice of the narrator, in Point Counter Point (1928)

• Caricature is rough truth. George Meredith, the character Sir Willoughby speaking, in The Egoist (1879)

• Caricature is the tribute which mediocrity pays to genius. Oscar Wilde, quoted in Hesketh Pearson, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit (1946)

(see AUTOMOBILES)

(see also DAYDREAM and FANTASY and ILLUSION and PIPE DREAM

• Castles in the air—they are so easy to take refuge in. And so easy to build, too. especially for the builders who have a—a dizzy conscience. Henrik Ibsen, the character Hilda speaking, in The Master Builder (1892)

• There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Joseph Heller, in Catch-22 (1961)

QUOTE NOTE: These days, almost everyone knows the central plot of Heller’s darkly comic novel: a WWII pilot named Frank Yossarian (also known as Orr) tries to get himself declared insane in order to be relieved of bombing flights. In the maddening world of the military, however, there was a problem, described above. About the “catch-22” regulation, the narrator continues: “Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions.”

The term “Catch-22” is now a part of the cultural lexicon, describing a logical paradox that arises when people want or need something, but can only acquire it by not wanting or needing it (as in: you can’t get a job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job). The term has become one of the most popular idioms of the modern era and is now included in almost all modern dictionaries, as in this entry in The American Heritage Dictionary: “1. A situation in which a desired outcome or solution is impossible to attain because of a set of inherently contradictory rules or conditions; 2. A contradictory or self-defeating course of action; 3. A tricky or disadvantageous condition; a catch.”

(see also CHRISTIANITY and CHURCH CLERGY and CONGREGATION and MOSQUE and PRAYER and PREACHING & PREACHERS and RELIGION and SAINTS & SAINTHOOD and TEMPLE)

• Cathedrals do not seem to me to have been built. They seem, rather, stupendous growths of nature, like crystals, or cliffs of basalt. Harriet Beecher Stowe, in Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854)

• A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life raft, and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. Caitlin Moran, “Alma Mater,” in The Reading Agency, The Library Book (2012)

Moran continued: “On a cold, rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen, instead. A human with a brain and a heart and a desire to be uplifted, rather than a customer with a credit card and an inchoate ‘need’ for ‘stuff.’”

• I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals—grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an 1882 observation, quoted in Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth Cady Stanton As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary. and Reminiscences, Vol. 2 (1922)

(see also ANGLICANISM & ANGLICANS and ATHEISM & AGNOSTICISM and BAPTISTS and BUDDHISM & BUDDHISTS and CHRISTIANITY and CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM and CHURCH OF ENGLAND and EVANGELICALS and HINDUISM & HINDUS and HOLOCAUST and ISLAM & MUSLIMS and JUDAISM & JEWS and POPES & THE PAPACY and PROTESTANTISM & PROTESTANTS and PURITANISM & PURITANS and RELIGION and VATICAN)

• Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination—everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell. John Adams, in letter to wife Abigail (Oct. 9, 1774)

• If I were going to convert to any religion I would probably choose Catholicism because it at least has female saints and the Virgin Mary. Margaret Atwood, in Earl G. Ingersoll, Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations With Margaret Atwood (2006)

• The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine—but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. Hilaire Belloc, a remark to William Temple, in Robert Speaight, The Life of Hilaire Belloc (1957).

• Anti-Catholicism is the anti-semitism of the intellectuals. Pat Buchanan, quoted in the Observer (London; Dec. 15, 1991)

• The most important thing about me is that I am a Catholic. It’s a superstructure within which you can work, like a sonnet. Jean Kerr, quoted in Time magazine (April 14, 1961)

• I am disturbed about Roman Catholicism. This church stands before the world with its pomp and power, insisting that it possesses the only truth. It incorporates an arrogance that becomes a dangerous spiritual arrogance. It stands with its noble Pope who somehow rises to the miraculous heights of infallibility when he speaks ex cathedra. But I am disturbed about a person or an institution that claims infallibility in this world. I am disturbed about any church that refuses to cooperate with other churches under the pretense that it is the only true church. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Paul’s Letter to American Christians,” a sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama (Nov. 4, 1956)

Dr. King continued: “I must emphasize the fact that God is not a Roman Catholic, and that the boundless sweep of his revelation cannot be limited to the Vatican. Roman Catholicism must do a great deal to mend its ways.”

• Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It’s a painful religion. We’re all gluttons for punishment. Madonna, in interview in Rolling Stone magazine (March 23, 1989)

• It is now quite lawful for for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry. H. L. Mencken, “Minority Report,” in Notebooks (1956)

• Children who were very truly pious in a Catholic childhood are apt to retain a nostalgia for the absolute. Sonia Orwell, quoted in Hilary Spurling, The Girl From the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (2002)

• Protestant women may take the pill. Roman Catholic women must keep taking The Tablet. Irene Thomas, quoted in the Guardian (London; Dec. 28, 1990)

(see also ANIMAL METAPHORS and CATS and CATS & DOGS and DOGS)

• It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. Deng Xiaoping, quoted in The Washington Post (Jan. 22, 1982)

• The fog comes/on little cat feet./It sits looking/over the harbor and city/on silent haunches/and then moves on. Carl Sandburg, in “Fog” (1916)

• One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar,” in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

• We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot-stove lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. Mark Twain, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” in Following the Equator (1897)

(including KITTENS; see also ANIMALS and BIRDS and CATS & DOGS and DOGS and HORSES and PETS)

• I think all cats are wild. They only act tame if there’s a saucer of milk in it for them. Douglas Adams, in a discussion of feral cats, in 1989 BBC radio documentary Last Chance to See; in 1990 published under the same title, and formally authored by Douglas Adams and Carwardine

• If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, you end up with a non-working cat. Do not try this. Douglas Adams, quoted by Richard Dawkins, in “Eulogy for Douglas Adams,” in www.Edge.org (Sep. 17 2001)

• Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats. Kingsley Amis, the voice of the narrator, in Difficulties with Girls (1988)

• As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind. Cleveland Amory, in The Cat Who Came for Christmas (1987)

Amory continued: “They realize that, whether they like it or not, they are simply going to have to put up with what to them are excruciatingly slow mental processes, that we humans have embarrassingly low I.Q.’s, and that probably because of these defects, we have an infuriating inability to understand, let alone follow, even the simplest and most explicit of directions.”

• There are three basic personality factors in cats: The kind who run up when you say hello and rub against you in cheap romance; the kind who run away certain that you mean to ravish them; and the kind who just look back and don’t move a muscle. I love all three kinds. Eve Babitz, in Eve’s Hollywood (1974)

• The cat is not in the long run anxious to please. T. O. Beachcroft, in Just Cats (1936; photographs by L. D. Luard)

• The cat is, above all things, a dramatist. Margaret Benson, in The Soul of a Cat: And Other Stories (1901)

Benson continued: “Its life is lived in an endless romance though the drama is played out on quite another stage than our own, and we only enter into it as subordinate characters, as stage managers, or rather stage carpenters.“

• Cat, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

• If a cat spoke, it would say things like, “Hey, I don’t see the problem here.” Roy Blount, Jr., in The Atlantic Monthly (Feb., 1985)

• A cat…plays for her own enjoyment, in a self-contained way, with no desire to share. Shut her up alone, and a ball, a fringe, or a looped piece of string is enough to make her give herself up to silent and graceful sport. Karel Čapek, in Intimate Things (1935)

Capek continued: “While she is playing, she does not say, ‘Man, I’m so awfully glad I’ve got you here!’ She will play beside the bed of a corpse.”

• A cat knows how to anticipate. Roger Caras, in A Cat is Watching (1989)

• The cat crossed the street daintily, pointing his feet like a ballet dancer, lifting them high as if his feet were too good for the pavement. Vera Caspary, in Laura (1943)

• Cats don’t have friends. They have co-conspirators. Darby Conley, in his Get Fuzzy comic strip (May 31, 2015)

• A grey old cat his whiskers licked beside;/A type of sadness in the house of pride. George Crabbe, in “The Parish Register” (1807)

• A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher’s—it would be out of place in a bookseller’s. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger’s or a baker’s. In these shops the cat is a useful animal—I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice—but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative—contemplative—philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment. William Darling, the voice of the narrator, in The Bankrupt Bookseller (1947)

• Perhaps God made cats so that man might have the pleasure of fondling the tiger. Robertson Davies, a reflection of the title character, in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

In the work, Marchbanks also offers this thought about kittens:

“The kitten has a luxurious, Bohemian, unpuritanical nature. It eats six meals a day, plays furiously with a toy mouse and a piece of rope, and suddenly falls into a deep sleep whenever the fit takes it. It never feels the necessity to do anything to justify its existence; it does not want to be a Good Citizen; it has never heard of Service. It knows that it is beautiful and delightful, and it considers that a sufficient contribution to the general good. And in return for its beauty and charm it expects fish, meat, and vegetables, a comfortable bed, a chair by the grate fire, and endless petting.”

• Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. Robertson Davies, from a character in the play Mehitabel (1959); reprinted in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1990)

QUOTE NOTE: Mehitabel is one of Davies’ lesser-known works, published in 1959. The play was inspired by a cat of the same name, originally created by Don Marquis and featured in his “Archy and Mehitabel” newspaper columns. In those columns, Mehitabel was a streetwise alley cat who claimed to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra. She related her adventures in free verse poetry, while Archy, a cockroach who was a poet in a previous life, typed the poems by jumping on the keys of a typewriter.

• Cats—by day the most docile of God’s creatures, every one of them in the night enlisting under the devil’s banner—took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased. W. H. Davies, in The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp (1908)

• I love in the cat that independent and almost ungrateful temper which prevents him from attaching himself to anyone; the indifference with which he passes from the salon to the housetop. François-René de Chateaubriand, quoted in Comte de Marcellus, Chateaubriand et son Temps (1859)

• The cat purrs itself to sleep, being the only creature that sings its own lullaby. Malcolm de Chazal, in Sens-Plastique (1948)

• In Greenville, South Carolina, I had the honor of knowing a magnificent tom[cat], weighing eight pounds, who opened doors by leaping up, seizing the knob forcibly between his fore-paws, and turning it, his only defect in the matter being that he could not close the door after him. John William De Forest, “Modern Cats,” in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1874)

De Forest continued: “Some years ago a family residing in New Haven, Connecticut, was alarmed by what the servants supposed to be a ghost, and the lady of the house, a thief. An outside door was repeatedly opened, no one entering but the cat. In spite of watching, nobody was discovered, and the mystery grew to be frightful. At last the ghost was caught, and it proved to be pussy. She had observed, she had reflected, she had drawn an inference; in other words, she had performed three distinct intellectual operations. The result was that she knew how to open doors by leaping up to the latch and pressing her paw on the thumb-piece.”

• Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us beings of wider speculation? George Eliot, a reflection of the narrator, in Middlemarch (1871)

• Before a Cat will condescend/To treat you as a trusted friend,/Some little token of esteem/Is needed, like a dish of cream. T. S. Eliot, “The Ad-dressing of Cats,” in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Eliot continued: “And you might now and then supply/Some caviar, or Strassburg Pie,/Some potted grouse, or salmon paste—/He’s sure to have his personal taste.”

• Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat. Anne Enright, in The Gathering (2007)

• The Cat was a creature of absolute convictions, and his faith in his deductions never varied. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “The Cat,” in Treasury of Great Cat Stories (1987; Roger Caras, ed.)

• Nothing’s more playful than a young cat, nor more grave than an old one. Thomas Fuller, in Gnomologia (1732)

• The cat is the only non-gregarious domestic animal. It is retained by its extraordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which it reared. Francis Galton, in Inquiries Into Human Faculty (1883)

• The cat is a dilettante in fur. Théophile Gauthier, quoted in Nigel Rees, Cassell Companion to Quotations (1997)

• There was something theatrical and grandiloquent about him, and he seemed to pose like an actor who attracts admiration. His motions were slow, undulating, and full of majesty. Théophile Gauthier, on his cat Enjolras, in Ménagerie Intime (1869)

Gauthier continued: “He seemed always to be stepping on a table covered with china ornaments and Venetian glass, so circumspectly did he select the place where he put down his foot.”

• We don’t have a dog./We have a hostile cat./I think Sam’s/intelligent; he/resents being a pet. Louise Glück, “Meadowlands I,” in Meadowlands (1996)

• Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat. Robert A. Heinlein, in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985)

• How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven. Robert A. Heinlein, in To Sail Beyond the Sunset (1987)

• One cat just leads to another. Ernest Hemingway, in letter to first wife Hadley Mowrer (Nov. 25, 1943); reprinted in Hemingway, Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981; Carlos Baker, ed.)

• Cats are connoisseurs of comfort. James Herriot, in James Herriot’s Cat Stories (1994)

• As one of the poets has said, no cat ever gave anyone a straight answer. Dorothy J. Heydt, “Ratsbane,” in Sword and Sorceress VI (1990; Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.)

• However long you have a cat and however plainly he lays his life open before you, there is always something hidden, some name he goes by in a place you never heard of. Barbara Holland, in The Name of the Cat (1988)

In her book, Holland also wrote:

“Very few people have no opinions about cats.”

“ She’s a cat with a strong sense of order and the rightness of things, and would have made an excellent secretary.”

“The new little black cat never opens her mouth to say anything, but speaks in her throat, to herself, trotting up and down stairs and in and out of closets chirping and murmuring and exclaiming in a kind of watered-silk pattern of sound that can make the possessor of mere English feel as mute and flightless as a turnip.”

• We all know how cats feel about traveling in a car. You never see a cat with his head out the window, fur flying in the breeze. A cat is never anyone’s designated driver. Nicole Hollander, in Everything Here Is Mine (2000)

• A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings. W. R. Inge, in A Rustic Moralist (1934)

• Very few human beings are privileged to know the cat. He does not care whether you like him or not…. He is a philosopher. Michael Joseph, in Cat’s Company (1930)

• Confront a cat with something he has never seen before and his first reaction will almost invariably be not one of fear but of curiosity. Michael Joseph, in Cat’s Company (1930)

• A cat is sometimes inaccurately described as a domesticated animal. Fundamentally, he is no more domesticated than a crocodile. Michael Joseph, in Cat’s Company (1930)

• Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function. Garrison Keillor, in NPR broadcast of The Prairie Home Companion (June, 1983)

• I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me. Rudyard Kipling, in “The Cat That Walked by Himself,” in Just So Stories (1902)

• Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want. Joseph Wood Krutch, “February,” in Twelve Seasons (1949)

• Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia. Joseph Wood Krutch, in The Twelve Seasons (1949)

• Cats are narcissistic. Their needs come before ours. They don’t understand the word No. They carry themselves with that aloof, arrogant sense of perpetual entitlement, they will jump up and insinuate themselves wherever they please—on your lap, on your newspaper, on your computer keyboard—and they really couldn’t care less how their behavior affects the people in their lives. I’ve had boyfriends like this; who needs such behavior in a housepet? Caroline Knapp, “Lucille Versus Stumpy: The (Real) Truth About Cats and Dogs,” in The Merry Recluse (2004)

QUOTE NOTE: Knapp’s essay, originally published in 1998, was written in response to an article (“Stumpy Versus Lucille: The Great Pet Debate”) that her friend and fellow journalist Ron Rosenbaum had written in his regular column in the New York Observer (Aug. 8, 1998). Rosenbaum, in proclaiming the superiority of cats–particularly his cat Stumpy–over dogs, had disparaged canines as “the pathetic transparent brown-nosers of the domestic animal kingdom” (see more on Rosenbaum’s views in DOGS and in CATS & DOGS). Knapp’s essay, a rejoinder to Rosenbaum’s thesis, proclaimed the superiority of dogs–particularly her dog Lucille–over cats.

• I like a cat because it does not disguise its selfishness with any flattering hypocrisies. Its attachment is not to yourself, but to your house. Let it but have food, and a warm lair among the embers, and it heeds not at whose expense. Then it has the spirit to resent aggression. You shall beat your dog, and he will fawn upon you; but a cat never forgives: it has no tender mercies, and it torments before it destroys its prey. L. E. Landon, Ethel Churchill: or The Two Brides, Vol. I (1837)

• The cat is a wild animal that inhabits the homes of humans. Konrad Lorenz, in Man Meets Dog (1949; in English 1954)

• If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air. Doris Lessing, in Particularly Cats…and Rufus (1967)

• Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another. C. S. Lewis, in a July 31, 1962 letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, in Letters to an American Lady (pub. posthumously in 1967)

• It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. H. P. Lovecraft, the voice of the narrator in the short story “The Cats of Ulthar,” in The Tryout (1920); reprinted in Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1943)

In the story, the narrator continued: “He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.”

• Cats always made up to the people who hated them the most. Depending on how you chose to look at it, it was a touching manifestation of trust, or a malicious pleasure in human discomfort. Barbara Michaels, in Witch (1973)

• Cats sleep fat and walk thin. Rosalie Moore, “Catalogue,” in The New Yorker (May 25, 1940)

• What I like about cats is the way they ignore you. There’s no telling what way they feel. If I want to be popular all I have to do is rattle the tin opener and he’s all over me, purring and sharpening his back on my shins. Bernard MacLaverty, in the short story, “Words the Happy Say,” in The Great Profundo: and Other Stories (1989)

• The idea, to a cat, that somebody else owns him is ludicrous. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, in The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey Into the Feline Heart (2002)

• The cat does not merely experience contentment, he exudes it. You cannot be in the presence of a contented cat and not have some of that contentment rub off on you. Which surely is a good part of the reason we love cats so. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, in The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats: A Journey Into the Feline Heart (2002)

Later in the chapter Masson went on to write:

“Many people feel more complete with a cat in their life, and I would not be surprised if cats felt the same way about us. I know that if I disappeared from the lives of my five cats, they would not be as happy as before. I know, because they wait for me to go on walks along the beach, though they could perfectly well go on their own. When I am with them, they react in such a strong way, gamboling, racing ahead of me, and then flopping down in my path, that it is obvious they derive great pleasure from my company. I find it hard to believe, though, that they could possibly enjoy my company as much as I enjoy theirs. This is not surprising: we domesticated cats for our benefit. While they get something from it, we probably got the better deal.”

• Anything that moves becomes for them an object of fun. They believe that nature exists only for their amusement. François-Augustin de Paradis de Moncrif, in cats, in A History of Cats (1727)

QUOTE NOTE: In the essay “Agrippina” (in her 1893 book Essays in Idleness, Agnes Repplier offered a slightly different translation, writing: “Wisely has Moncrif observed that a cat is not merely diverted by everything that moves, but is convinced that all nature is occupied exclusively with catering to her diversion.”

• When I play with my cat, who knows whether she isn’t amusing herself with me more than I am amusing myself with her? Michel de Montaigne, in Essays (1580)

• People who don’t like cats always seem to think there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them. L. M. Montgomery, in The Blue Castle (1926)

• The domestic cat is a contradiction. No animal has developed such an intimate relationship with mankind, while at the same time demanding and getting such independence of movement and action. Desmond Morris, in Catwatching (1986)

Morris continued: “The dog may be man’s best friend, but it is rarely allowed out on its own to wander from garden to garden or street to street. The obedient dog has to be taken for a walk. The headstrong cat walks alone.”

• Cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their “evil” look at such times is no human projection. Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae (1990)

Paglia continued: “The cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it.”

• The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal—or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be. Elizabeth Peters, in The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog (1992)

In the book, Peters also offered these observations:

“Nothing looks as self-satisfied as a contented cat.”

“The approval of a cat cannot but flatter the recipient.”

• This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity, whose presence turns a house into a home. Agnes Repplier, “Agrippina,” in Essays in Idleness (1893)

• If I call Agrippina, she does not come; if I tell her to go away, she remains where she is; if I try to persuade her to show off her one or two little accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous but unswerving decision. Agnes Repplier, on her beloved pet, “Agripinna,” in Essays in Idleness (1893)

Repplier preceded the thought by writing: “A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat.”

• For there is nothing so lowering to one’s self-esteem as the affectionate contempt of a beloved cat. Agnes Repplier, in The Fireside Sphinx (1901)

In the book, Repplier also wrote: “Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.”

• The vanity of man revolts from the serene indifference of the cat. Agnes Repplier, “The Grocer’s Cat,” in Americans and Others (1912)

• Cats, indeed, appear to regard human beings who may be domiciled with them rather as part of the furniture than as comrades. Louis Robinson, in Wild Traits in Tame Animals (1897)

Robinson continued: “We are probably, to the feline mind, merely so many items of environment which might affect a cat’s safety or comfort.

• I just don’t get cats. To me, they’re a waste of fur. Rita Rudner, in First (1993)

• Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance. Saki (pen name of H. H. Munro), “The Achievement of the Cat,” in The Complete Saki (1976)

Munro preceded the thought by offering this observation about cats: “The animal which the Egyptians worshipped as divine, which the Romans venerated as a symbol of liberty, which Europeans in the ignorant Middle Ages anathematized as an agent of demonology, has displayed to all ages two closely blended characteristics—courage and self-respect.”

• All cats were at first wild. But were at length tamed by the industry of Mankind; it is a Beast of prey, even the tame one, more especially the wild, it being in the opinion of many nothing but a diminutive Lyon. William Salmon, employing the then-popular spelling of lion, in The Compleat English Physician (1693)

• When cats sat staring into the fire they were thinking out problems. Dorothy L. Sayers, in Clouds of Witness (1926)

• See the cat at love, rolling with its sweetheart, up and over, with shriek and moan. But if a person comes by, they break away, sit separate upon a fence washing their faces—and might never have met at all. Stevie Smith, in Cats in Colour (1959)

In the book, Smith also wrote: “I like to see cats in movement. A galloping cat is a fine sight. See it cross the road in a streak, cursed by the drivers of motor cars and buses, dodging the butcher's bicycle, coming safe to the kerb [sic] and bellying under its home gate.”

• I cannot agree that it should be the declared public policy of Illinois that a cat visiting a neighbor’s yard or crossing the highways is a public nuisance. It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming. Adlai E. Stevenson, in an April 23, 1949 veto message while serving as governor of Illinois; reprinted in The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson (1973; Walter Johnson, ed.)

QUOTE NOTE: In his veto of the legislation, Stevenson also wrote: “Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in rural areas, in combating rodents—work they necessarily perform alone and without regard for property lines.”

• The life of the city cat is short but so sophisticated. Jennifer Stone, “On the Naming of Cats,” in The Cat Book (1988)

• The playful kitten…is infinitely more amusing than half the people one is obliged to live with in the world. Lady Morgan Sydney, in The Book of the Boudoir, Vol. 2 (1829)

• Nothing makes a house cozier than cats. Gladys Taber, in The Book of Stillmeadow (1948)

In the book, Taber also wrote: “A cat is, by and large, sophisticated and complex, and capable of creating three-act plays around any single piece of action.”

• Cat lovers know that every cat is remarkable. Gladys Taber, in Still Cove Journal (1981)

In the Journal, Taber also wrote: “Most cats feel that bird-catching is their duty; the instinct goes back to prehistoric times. Amber keeps in practice by chasing moths.”

• Cats, no less liquid than their shadows,/Offer no angles to the wind./They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes/Less than themselves. A. S. J. Tessimond, “Cats II” (1934), in Not Love Perhaps: Selected Poems (1978)

These are the opening lines of Tessimond’s lovely poetic tribute to cats. The full poem may be seen at “Cats II”

• Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an inscrutable mystery, beyond human reach, the least human of all creatures and at the same time, as any cat owner will attest, the most intelligent. Lewis Thomas, “Clever Animals,” in Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1983)

• A home without a cat—and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat—may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title? Mark Twain, in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

The narrator preceded the thought by writing: “When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there—in sunny weather—stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then that home was complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible.”

• Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. Mark Twain, an 1894 notebook entry, in Notebook (1935; A. E. Paine, ed.)

Twain added: “If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

• Yesterday…was a very queer and alarming day: classically still and brooding, and both our cats with staring coats, and slinking about at my heels in the most woe-begone way. They have a wonderful talent for being Cassandras, only unfortunately they cannot prophesy with any explicit detail, so we never know whether to expect floods, lightning, or visitors. Sylvia Townsend Warner, in a 1957 letter, in Letters: Sylvia Townsend Warner (1982; William Maxwell, ed.)

• I wish you could see the two cats, drowsing side by side in a Victorian nursing chair, their paws, their ears, their tails complementally [sic] adjusted, their blue eyes blinking open on a single thought of when I shall remember it’s their suppertime. They might have been composed by Bach for two flutes. Sylvia Townsend Warner, in a 1965 letter, in Letters: Sylvia Townsend Warner (1982; William Maxwell, ed.)

• One reason why my memory decays is that I have three cats, all so loving and insistent that they play cat’s-cradle with every train of thought. They drove me distracted while I was having influenza, gazing at me with large eyes and saying: O Sylvia, you are so ill, you'll soon be dead. And who will feed us then? Feed us now! Sylvia Townsend Warner, in a 1977 letter, in Letters: Sylvia Townsend Warner (1982; William Maxwell, ed.)

• She is a gray cat, but around her eyes the fur is black, so that she looks a little like those fifteen-year-olds who believe that being Cleopatra is mostly a matter of mascara. Jessamyn West, in A Matter of Time (1966)

• Round, gray, plump-jowled like a grandmother, she washed, ate, and saw to it that she and her offspring went outside for calls of nature as regularly as any privy-bound housewife. With a recipe written in cat language, she could have baked cookies or fried a chicken. Jessamyn West, in The Life I Really Lived (1979)

• Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word. Rebecca West, “Pounce,” in The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010)

• A cat devotes most of his life to gratifying his basic needs and thereby making himself happy. You may have noticed that a cat’s first commitment is to himself. Carole C. Wilbourn, in Cat Talk (1979)

• A cat does furnish a room. Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow. But a cat also is a flawlessly designed killer. George F. Will, “Winston, the User-Friendly Cat,” in Will’s syndicated Washington Post column (Dec. 28, 1989); reprinted in Suddenly: The American Idea Abroad and at Home, 1986–1990 (1990)

QUOTE NOTE: This killer quality, according to Will, helped human beings get civilization. He continued: “Cats are carnivores that prey on vegetarians. When humans advanced from hunter-gatherers to tillers of soil, they needed cats. Agriculture, and hence everything else, depends upon storage of surpluses, and hence depends on control of mice and rats. Small wonder Egyptians worshiped cats. Later, when Europe was swept by plagues, cats helped control rodents that were disease carriers.”

• The real objection to the great majority of cats is their insufferable air of superiority. Cats, as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by the fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshiped as gods. P. G. Wodehouse, the character Mr. Mulliner speaking, “The Story of Webster,” in Mulliner Nights (1933); reprinted in A Wodehouse Bestiary (1985)

Mulliner continued: “This makes them too prone to set themselves up as critics and censors of the frail and erring human beings whose lot they share. They stare rebukingly. They view with concern. And on a sensitive man this often has the worst effects, inducing an inferiority complex of the gravest kind.”

(see also ANIMALS and BIRDS and CATS and DOGS and HORSES and PETS)

• Dogs have owners, cats have staffs. Author Unknown

• Lord,/I am the cat./It is not, exactly, that I have something to ask of You!/No—/I ask nothing of anyone—/but,/…/Wouldn’t You like someday/to put a curse on the whole race of dogs?/If so I should say, Amen. Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, “The Prayer of the Cat,” in Prayers From the Ark (1963)

• A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit. Roy Blount, Jr., in Not Exactly What I Had in Mind (2013)

Blount preceded the thought by writing: “I don’t know why cats are such habitual vomiters. They don’t seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while doing it. Every so often cats say to themselves, ‘Well, time to vomit,’ and then they do. It’s in their nature.”

• Dogs are high on life. Cats need catnip. Mary Bly, in Missy Dizick & Mary Bly, Dogs are Better Than Cats (1985)

• Dogs will come when called. Cats will take a message and get back to you. Missy Dizick, in Missy Dizick & Mary Bly, Dogs are Better Than Cats (1985)

• Dogs serve people, but people serve cats. Temple Grandin, in Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals Make Us Human (2010)

• If animals could speak as fabulists have feigned, the dog would be a blunt, blundering, outspoken, honest fellow, but the cat would have the rare talent of never saying a word too much. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, in Chapters on Animals (1893)

ERROR ALERT: On almost all internet sites—and in scores of published books on cats and dogs—a similar sentiment has been mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain. To see the full original observation, go to Hamerton on Cats & Dogs

• Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are god. Christopher Hitchens, in Introduction to The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (2007)

• You shall beat your dog, and he will fawn upon you; but a cat never forgives: it has no tender mercies, and it torments before it destroys its prey. L. E. Landon, Ethel Churchill: or The Two Brides, Vol. I (1837)

Landon introduced the thought by writing: “I like a cat because it does not disguise its selfishness with any flattering hypocrisies. Its attachment is not to yourself, but to your house. Let it but have food, and a warm lair among the embers, and it heeds not at whose expense. Then it has the spirit to resent aggression.”

• We own a dog—he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat—he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. H. P. Lovecraft, “Cats and Dogs,” in Something About Cats: And Other Pieces (1971)

Lovecraft continued: “It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolized master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolize, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily have chosen another companion…more agreeable and interesting.”

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites mistakenly omit the word philosophic, and end the quotation as if it were phrased “the friend confidant of a cat” (a mistake that deprives the reader of the completely delightful final portion of the observation).

• Dogs want only love but cats demand worship. L. M. Montgomery, the character Dean Priest speaking, in Emily of New Moon (1923)

• Dogs…can be made to feel guilty about anything, including the sins of their owners. Cats refuse to take the blame for anything—including their own sins. Elizabeth Peters, in Trojan Gold (1987)

• It’s funny how dogs and cats know the insides of folks better than other folks do, isn’t it? Eleanor H. Porter, the title character speaking, in Pollyanna (1912)

• The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry. Proverb (French)

• People who wish to salute the free and independent side of their evolutionary character acquire cats. People who wish to pay homage to their servile and salivating roots own dogs. Anna Quindlen, “Mr. Smith Goes to Heaven,” in The New York Times (April 7, 1991); reprinted in Thinking Out Loud (1993)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation appeared in a eulogy—done in traditional New York Times style—Quindlen wrote for the family dog, Jason Oliver C. Smith, who died eight days earlier at age thirteen. The entire article, a must-read for any dog lover who’s ever mourned the loss of a family pet, may be read in full at: “Mr. Smith Goes to Heaven.”

• A man who owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its master; the term expresses accurately their mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when applied to the limited possession of a cat. Agnes Repplier, “Agripinna,” in Essays in Idleness (1893)

About her beloved cat, Repplier went on to write: “If I call Agrippina, she does not come; if I tell her to go away, she remains where she is; if I try to persuade her to show off her one or two little accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous but unswerving decision.”

• The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses. Agnes Repplier, in The Fireside Sphinx (1901)

• The dog is guided by kindly instinct to the man or woman whose heart is open to his advances. The cat often leaves the friend who courts her, to honor, or to harass, the unfortunate mortal who shudders at her unwelcome caresses. Agnes Repplier, in The Fireside Sphinx (1901)

• If the dog’s hunting motto is ‘The more the merrier,’ the cat’s is ‘The fewer the better fare.’” Louis Robinson, in Wild Traits in Tame Animals (1897)

• A dog, as someone said, always acts like he’s afraid he's going to lose his job. A cat acts like the employer, you’re the ranch hand—and you’re always in danger of losing your job. A cat’s vast sense of entitlement may be delusive, but at least it’s honest: A cat does not fake orgasms of affection the way dogs do, a cat is not an easy lay emotionally. If you win the love of a cat you have something meaningful, you have something that can genuinely increase your self-respect. Ron Rosenbaum, “Stumpy Versus Lucille: The Great Pet Debate,” in The New York Observer (August 9, 1988)

Rosenbaum offered these thoughts in response to the success of Caroline Knapp’s adoring book about dogs—and especially her dog Lucille—in her 1998 best-seller Pack of Two. A bit later in the article, Rosenbaum went on to add: “That old saying, ‘Want a friend, buy a dog’ could have been invented by a cat. You can buy a dog’s friendship, but with a cat a lifetime of devotion might, only might qualify you for some visible signs of affection. And then again, it might not. But it seems to me that even the slightest intimation of affection from a cat like Stumpy means far, far more than the slobbering flattery of some brown-nosing dog.”

• I love both the way a dog looks up to me and a cat condescends to me. Gladys Taber, in Stillmeadow Daybook (1955)

In another comparison from the book, Taber wrote: “I cannot imagine a cat in an Obedience ring, running around in the hot sun and doing things on command. For it would not make sense. Whereas a dog is tolerant of your not making sense and only wants to fix things so you are happy.”

• Walking is a human habit into which dogs readily fall but it is a distasteful form of exercise to a cat unless he has a purpose in view. Carl Van Vechten, in The Tiger in the House: A Cultural History of the Cat (1936)

Van Vechten preceded the observation by writing: “A cat will not take an excursion merely because a man wants a walking companion.” And he continued the comparison by adding: “I have never known a cat with a purpose in view to refuse a walk.”

• If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you. If a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. Alfred North Whitehead, in Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1977; Lucien Price, ed.)

(see also CONDIMENTS and EATING and FOOD and HAMBURGERS and HOT DOGS and MUSTARD and PEPPER and RELISH and SALT and SEASONINGS and TABASCO SAUCE)

• Shake and shake/The catsup bottle,/None will come,/And then a lot’ll. Richard Armour, in Going to Extremes (1949)

(includes [Good] CAUSE and [Just] CAUSE and [Lost] CAUSE; see also see CAUSE [as in Causal Agent] and CAMPAIGN and CRUSADE and DRIVE and MOVEMENT and REFORM & REFORMERS)

• God is not averse to deceit in a holy cause. Aeschylus, a fragment, quoted in George Seldes, The Great Thoughts (1985)

• I feel I have a cause. A cause may be inconvenient, but it’s magnificent. It’s like champagne or high heels, and one must be prepared to suffer for it. Arnold Bennett, the character Hildegarde speaking, in The Title: A Comedy in Three Acts (1918)

• Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good. Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici (1642)

• The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. William Jennings Bryan, in 1896 speech at National Democratic Convention; reprinted in The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (1896)

• They never fail who die/In a great cause. George Noel Gordon (Lord Byron), in Marino Faliero (1821)

• When a just cause reaches its flood-tide…whatever stands in the way must fall before its overwhelming power. Carrie Chapman Catt, “ “Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?” a 1911 speech to the International Woman Suffrage Association (Stockholm, Sweden)

• I give it as my firmest conviction that service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life. Carrie Chapman Catt, “The Making of A Pioneer Suffragette,” in The American Scrap Book (1928)

• When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men's souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth, and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe-striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty. Winston Churchill, in a BBC radio broadcast (June 16, 1941); published in The Imperial Review (June 28, 1941)

• If a cause be good, the most violent attack of its enemies will not injure it so much as an injudicious defense of it by its friends. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes. Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Critical Articles: Introduction,” in Complete Collected Works (1895)

• In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad. Freeman Dyson, in Disturbing the Universe (1979)

Dyson preceded the observation by writing: “A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self sacrifice.”

• Great causes are never tried on their merits; but the cause is reduced to particulars to suit the size of the partisans, and the contention is ever hottest on minor matters. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays: Second Series (1844)

• He that hath the worst cause makes the most noise. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs (1732)

• A good cause makes a stout heart and a strong arm. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia: Adages and Proverbs (1732)

• Truth never damages a cause that is just. Mohandas K. Gandhi, in Non-Violence in Peace and War, Vol. 2 (1949)

• The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man’s right to his body, or woman’s right to her soul. Emma Goldman, “What I Believe,” in New York World (1908)

• Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer (1951)

Also in the book, Hoffer these two other observations:

“The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.”

“Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, Hoffer is credited as saying, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” There is, however, no evidence that he ever wrote or said such a thing.

• We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. William James, in letter to E. L. Godkin (Dec. 24, 1895)

• If you believe you have a just cause, an important message, or a key contribution to make, you will be just as innovative as a college freshman desperate to see his girlfriend six hundred miles away. You will get there any way you can. Laurie Beth Jones, in Jesus CEO: Using Ancient Wisdom for Visionary Leadership (1995)

• If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Abraham Lincoln, in address to Washingtonian Temperance Society, Springfield, Illinois (Feb 22, 1842)

Lincoln continued: “Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what you will, is the great high-road to his reason, and which, when once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing his judgement of the justice of your cause.”

• A bad cause seldom fails to betray itself. James Madison, in The Federalist Papers, No. 41; originally published in the New York Independent Journal (Jan. 19, 1788)

• Nothing fails like success; nothing is so defeated as yesterday’s triumphant Cause. Phyllis McGinley, “How to Get Along With Men,” in The Province of the Heart (1959)

• A bad cause should be silent. Ovid, in Epistulae ex Ponto [“Letters from the Black Sea’] (1st c. A.D.)

• When the Cause Has Charisma, Shrinking Violets Bloom in Public. Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, a section title, in Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters (2007)

QUOTE NOTE: The concept of a noble cause has been around for some time, but Porras and his colleagues extended the idea by suggesting that a cause itself can have charisma. They went on to write: “Enduringly successful people—whether they’re shrinking violets or swashbuckling entrepreneurs—serve the cause, and it also serves them. It recruits them and they are lifted up by its power. When that happens for you, a bigger, more engaging version of you shows up.” A little later, the authors further explicated the idea by writing: “For the cause to have charisma, it must reach into your heart in a personal way to unlock all you have to give.”

• No one should be judge in his own cause. Proverb (English)

• A bad cause requires many words. Proverb (German)

• Men are blind in their own cause. Proverb (Scottish)

• In a just cause the weak will beat the strong. Sophocles, in Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.)

• When Gold argues the cause, eloquence is impotent. Publilius Syrus, in Sententiae (1st c. B.C.)

• 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 no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; 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 fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” speech at the Sorbonne (Paris; April 23, 1910)

• As a cause becomes more and more successful, the ideas of the people engaged in it are bound to change. Margaret Sanger, in Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (1938)

• God befriend us, as our cause is just. William Shakespeare, the title character speaking, in King Henry IV, Part I (1597)

• What need we any spur but our own cause. William Shakespeare, the character Brutus speaking, in Julius Caesar (1599)

• Because one cause is bad does not make the opposing cause good. Fay Weldon, in Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (1984)

• A good cause has to be careful of the company it keeps. Rebecca West, “World of Books: The Greek Way,” in the Sunday Times (London; Aug. 23, 1942

• It’s a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing. Andrew Young, in Playboy interview (July, 1977)

(see CAUSE [as in MOVEMENT] and CAUSE & EFFECT and EFFECTS)

• It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause. Helen Keller, in Out of the Dark (1914)

(includes CAREFUL & CAREFULNESS; see also BRAVERY and COWARDICE and DANGER and DARING and FEAR and HESITATION and PRUDENCE and RISK & RISK-TAKING and SAFETY and SECURITY)

• I see only one danger about all this—that you might be led to take too many precautions! Alfed Adler, quoted in Phyllis Bottome, Alfred Adler: A Portrait From Life (1957)

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites mistakenly present the thought as if it were phrased this way: “The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.”

• Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Susan B. Anthony, quoted in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898)

• The cautious seldom err. Confucius, in Analects (6th c. B.C.)

• If you risk nothing, then you risk everything. Geena Davis, quoted in Kevin Sessums, “Geena’s Sheen,” in Vanity Fair (Sep., 1992)

• You can’t test courage cautiously. Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood (1987)

• Do not be too timid & squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry (Nov. 26, 1842)

Emerson continued: “What if they are a little coarse, & you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice? Up again, you shall nevermore be so afraid of a tumble.”

• He that will not sail till all dangers are over must never put to sea. Thomas Fuller, M.D., in Gnomologia (1732)

• Life is made up of a series of judgments on insufficient data, and if we waited to run down all our doubts, it would flow past us. Learned Hand, in The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand (1959); Irving Dilliard, ed.)

• You must make up your mind to act decidedly and take the consequences. No good is ever done in this world by hesitation. T. H. Huxley, in letter to Anton Dohrn (Oct. 17, 1873); reprinted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, Vol. I (1900); Leonard Huxley, ed.)

• Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Helen Keller, in Let Us Have Faith (1940)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has become indelibly associated with Keller, whose life personified the words. Here’s the full passage in which her signature line originally appeared: “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run that outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

• Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature. Tom Robbins, the voice of the narrator, in Still Life with Woodpecker: A Novel (1980)

• It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default. J. K. Rowling, in “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination,” Harvard University Commencement Address (June 5, 2008)

• Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

• In thinking about the future, it is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution. Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock (1970)

Toffler preceded the thought by writing: “Let us not fear occasional error—the imagination is only free when fear of error is temporarily laid aside.”

• Don’t…play for safety. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world. Hugh Walpole, the character Mrs. Launce speaking, in the novel Fortitude (1913)

(see also APPETIZERS and COOKS & COOKING and DESCRIPTIONS—OF FOODS & PREPARED DISHES and DINNERS & DINING and EATING and EPICUREANISM & EPICURES and FOOD and GASTRONOMY and GOURMETS & GOURMANDS and MEALS and RESTAURANTS)

• Caviar is to dining what a sable coat is to a girl in evening dress. Ludwig Bemelmans, in La Bonne Table (1964)

• Always do the things you fear the most; courage is an acquired taste, like caviar. Erica Jong, the protagonist Isadora Wing speaking, in How to Save Your Own Life (1977)

(including NOTORIETY; see also FAME and GLORY and IMAGE and LEGENDS and PUBLICITY and PUBLIC OPINION and REPUTATION and STARDOM & STARS and SUCCESS)

• It takes very little fire to make a great deal of smoke nowadays, and notoriety is not real glory. Louisa May Alcott, the voice of the narrator, in Jo’s Boys (1886)

• The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. Daniel Boorstin, in The Image (1961)

QUOTE NOTE: This has become one of Boorstin’s most popular quotations. Later in the book, he offered this additional observation: “A sign of a celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.”

• A celebrity is someone who no longer does the things that made him a celebrity. Peg Bracken, in But I Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World! (1973)

• Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve. Maureen Dowd, “Giant Puppet Show,” in The New York Times (Sep. 10, 1995)

• Celebrity is the religion of our time. Maureen Dowd, “Camelot 144,” in The New York Times (April 25, 1996)

• Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time. Carrie Fisher, quoted in Leslie Bennetts, “Carrie on Baggage,” Vanity Fair magazine (Oct. 5, 2009)

• Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. John Updike, in Self-Consciousness (1989)

Updike added: “As soon as one is aware of being ‘somebody,’ to be watched and listened to with extra interest, input ceases, and the performer goes blind and deaf in his overanimation. One can either see or be seen.”

(includes BOOK BANNING and BOOK BURNING; see also BOOKS and EXPURGATION and FREEDOM OF SPEECH and FREEDOM OF THE PRESS and JOURNALISM & JOURNALISTS and NEWSPAPERS and OBSCENITY and REPORTERS & REPORTING)

• As we see censorship it is a stupid giant traffic policeman answering “Yes” to “Am I my brother’s copper?” Franklin P. Adams, in Nods and Becks (1944)

Adams continued: “He guards a one-way street and his semaphore has four signs all marked ‘STOP!’”

• Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it. Author Unknown

ERROR ALERT: This saying is widely misattributed to Mark Twain, but he never said or wrote anything like it. The original author may never be known, but we do know that it was inspired by a passage in Robert A. Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon (1950) In the novel, a television executive is asked how he feels about censorship. He exclaims:

“Don’t use that word! How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over what we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show—it's enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”

• The punishment of wits enhances their authority, and a forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out. Francis Bacon, quoted by John Milton, in Areopagitica (1644)

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to the original appearance of a saying that I have not been able to find in any of Bacon’s writings. A number of people have reported that it comes from The Advancement of Learning (1605), but that does not appear to be the case.

• As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends. Jeremy Bentham, “Principles of the Penal Code,” in Theory of Legislation (1964)

• By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech. Harry A. Blackmun, in Roe v. Wade (1973)

• I believe that censorship grows out of fear, and because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed. Book banning satisfies their need to feel in control of their children’s lives. This fear is often disguised as moral outrage. They want to believe that if their children don’t read about it, their children won’t know about it. And if they don’t know about it, it won’t happen. Judy Blume, “Judy Blume Talks about Censorship,” an undated post on her website.

QUOTE NOTE: Blume, the author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) and a host of other bestselling Young Adult novels is one of the modern era’s most frequent targets of censors and book challengers. In her website satement, she also offers these two other thoughts on the subject:

“Censors don’t want children exposed to ideas different from their own. If every individual with an agenda had his/her way, the shelves in the school library would be close to empty.”

“But it’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.”

• In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced—writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices—and all because of fear. Judy Blume, “Censorship: A Personal View,” in Places I Never Meant to Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers (1999)

• There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Ray Bradbury, in Coda to the 1979 edition of Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Bradbury continued: “Every minority…feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.”

QUOTE NOTE: Bradbury’s dystopian 1953 novel went on to become a classic on the evils of censorship, book burning, and government attempts at mind control (the title comes from the temperature at which paper bursts into flame). He was moved to write the Coda after learning that many phrases and sayings from his original novel had been deleted from editions of the book used in high schools (those same phrases, however, remained intact in teachers’ editions of the book). The original 1953 edition had been out of print for some time, and the 1979 publication was considered a “restored” edition.

• The censor believes that he can hold back the mighty traffic of life with a tin whistle and a raised right hand. For, after all, it is life with which he quarrels. Heywood Broun, quoted in Ezra Goodman, The Fifty-Year Decline and Fall of Hollywood (1961)

• Some have said that the strongest drive is not love or hate, but the drive to censor another’s opinions. Marie Alena Castle, in Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom (2013)

• Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion, incapable, that is, of doing an honest or intelligent job. Henry Steele Commager, in Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent (1954)

Commager went on to add: “In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”

• Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with delusion. David Cronenberg, in Cronenberg on Cronenberg (1992)

• Censorship laws are blunt instruments, not sharp scalpels. Once enacted, they are easily misapplied to merely unpopular or only marginally dangerous speech. Alan M. Dershowitz, in Finding, Framing, and Hanging Jefferson (2008)

• Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in speech at Dartmouth College (June 14, 1953)

• Every burned book or house enlightens the world. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation,” in Essays: First Series (1841)

ERROR ALERT: This observation, which came in a discussion of the history of persecution, is almost always mistakenly presented as if it were worded every burned book enlightens the world.

• We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance, In the present, amidst dangers whose outcomes we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. E. M. Forster, “The Tercentenary of the Areopagitica,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

• What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books. Sigmund Freud, in a January, 1933 letter to Ernest Jones; reprinted in Jones’s, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, Vol. 1 (1953)

QUOTE NOTE: Freud offered this sardonic assessment shortly after he learned that the Nazis, who had recently assumed power in Germany, included many of his works in their book-burning efforts.

• Censorship and democracy don’t mix, and there is no argument in favor or censorship that does not assume an antidemocratic social tendency. Northrop Frye, “Dr. Kinsey and the Dream Censor” (1948), in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture (2003)

• However rationalized it may be censorship is always an attack on human intelligence and imagination and is always a sign of weakness, not strength, in those who enforce it. Northrop Frye, “Introduction to Canadian Literature” (1988), in Northrop Frye’s Fiction and Miscellaneous Writings (2007)

• The only way to forestall the work of criticism is through censorship, which has the same relation to criticism that lynching has to justice. Northrop Frye, “Polemical Introduction,” in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (2006)

• Censorship is to art what lynching is to justice. Henry Louis Gates, “2 Live Crew, Decoded,” in The New York Times (June 19, 1990)

QUOTE NOTE: In offering this observation, Professor Gates was almost certainly inspired by a similar 1957 observation from Northrop Frye (see his entry above)

• The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Paul Gilmore, quoted in Phillip Elmer-Dewitt, “First Nation in Cyberspace,” Time magazine (Dec. 6, 1993)

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly presented with the words as damage replaced by as a defect.

• Where there is official censorship it is a sign that speech is serious. Where there is none, it is pretty certain that the official spokesmen have all the loudspeakers. Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd (1960)

• Censorship may have to do with literature; but literature has nothing whatever to do with censorship. Nadine Gordimer, in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics, Places (1988; Stephen Clingman, ed.)

• Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever. Nadine Gordimer, “Censorship and Its Aftermath,” keynote address at P.E.N. International meeting on International Writer’s Day (June 2, 1990)

ERROR ALERT: All over the Internet, this observation is mistakenly attributed to Noam Chomsky

• Censorship is the height of vanity. Martha Graham, in Blood Memory: An Autobiography (1991)

• In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education. A. Whitney Griswold, “A Little Learning,” address at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts (Spring, 1952); reprinted in Atlantic Monthly (Nov. 1952)

Griswold preceded the thought by writing: “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail.”

• To portray only what you would like to be true is the beginning of censorship. David Hare, in The History Plays (1984)

• Wherever books will be burned, men also, will be burned. Heinrich Heine, in Almansor (1823)

• History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity. Holbrook Jackson, in The Fear of Books (1932)

• Censorship is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second. Phil Kerby, in a postcard to Nat Hentoff, quoted in Hentoff’s Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee (1993)

• It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea. Walter Lippmann, “The Nature of the Battle Over Censorship,” in Men of Destiny (1927)

• Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there. Clare Booth Luce, “Problem of Pornography,” in McCall’s magazine (Oct., 1966)

• We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1858)

• If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty 1859)

• As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. John Milton, in Areopagitica (1644)

• We all know that books burn—yet we have the greater knowledge that books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and nor force can abolish memory. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in message to American Booksellers Association (April 23, 1942)

• What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Salman Rushdie, quoted in Weekend Guardian (London; Feb. 10, 1990)

• An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship—it is a crime against our nature as human beings. Salman Rushdie, in speech at University of Colorado—Boulder (April 17, 2013); quoted in Joe Rubino, “Salman Rushdie Discusses the Role of the Novel,” in Huffington Post (April 18, 2013)

• Heretical views arise when the truth is uncertain, and it is only when the truth is uncertain that censorship is invoked. Bertrand Russell, in The Value of Free Thought (1944)

• All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. George Bernard Shaw, in Preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1902)

• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. George Bernard Shaw, in preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1911)

• Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. Potter Stewart, a dissenting opinion, in Ginzburg et. al. v. United States (1965)

Stewart continued: “Long ago those who wrote our First Amendment charted a different course. They believed a society can be truly strong only when it is truly free. In the realm of expression they put their faith, for better or for worse, in the enlightened choice of the people, free from the interference of a policeman’s intrusive thumb or a judge’s heavy hand. So it is that the Constitution protects coarse expression as well as refined, and vulgarity no less than elegance.”

• Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination. Harry S Truman, in speech at the National Archives (Dec. 15, 1952)

• But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me. Mark Twain, in letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore (Feb. 7, 1907)

• The censor’s sword pierces deeply into the heart of free expression. Earl Warren, in Times Film Corp v. City of Chicago (Jan. 23, 1961)

• God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. Rebecca West, “The Tosh Horse,” in The Strange Necessity (1928)

• I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it. Mae West, quoted in C. Robert Jennings, “Mae West: A Candid Conversation with the Indestructible Queen of Vamp and Camp,” Playboy magazine (Jan., 1971)

• Censorship made me. Mae West, quoted in Matthew McCann Fenton, “œGoodness Had Nothing to Do With It: The Life of Mae West,” in Biography magazine (Sep., 2001)

• I am beginning to feel a little more like an author now that I have had a book banned. The literary life, in this country, begins in jail. E. B. White, on learning that the U.S. Army and Navy had banned his 1942 book One Man’s Meat, in a letter to Stanley Hart White (June, 1944)

• The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book. Walt Whitman, a May 9, 1888 remark, quoted in Horace Traubel, Walt Whitman in Camden, Vol. 1 (1906)

(see also BLAME & BLAMING and CRITICISM and PRAISE and REPROACH)

• You do ill if you praise, but worse if you censure, what you do not understand. Leonardo da Vinci, a circa 1500 notebook entry, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-Books (1906, Edward MacCurdy, ed.)

• They have a right to censure, that have a heart to help. William Penn, in Some Fruits of Solitude (1693)

A little later in the book, Penn offered this related thought: “They must first judge themselves, that presume to censure others.”

• Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent. Jonathan Swift, in Thoughts of Various Subjects (1711)

(see also ANGLE and EDGE and FRAME OF REFERENCE and PERSPECTIVE)

• I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. Kurt Vonnegut, the character Finnerty speaking, in Player Piano: A Novel (1952)

Finnerty added: “Big undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.”

(see also ABSOLUTES & ABSOLUTIST THINKING and BELIEF and DOGMA and DOUBT and HERESY & HERETICS and PROBABILITY and UNCERTAINTY)

• I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems—personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Madeleine Albright, in Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 (2012/

• If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties. Francis Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning (1605)

• I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth—and truth rewarded me. Simone de Beauvoir, in All Said and Done (1972)

• I have lived in this world just long enough to look carefully the second time into things that I am most certain of the first time. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), quoted in Donald Day, Uncle Sam’s Uncle Josh: Or, Josh Billings on Practically Everything (1953)

• Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. “I’m right, your’e wrong. Shut up.” Brené Brown, “The Power of Vulnerability,” a TED Talk (Jan. 3, 2011 )

• Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating. Karl von Clausewitz, in On War (1832-34)

Clausewitz continued: “It prefers to day-dream in the realms of chance and luck rather than accompany the intellect on its narrow and tortuous path of philosophical inquiry and logical deduction.”

• I am certain there is too much certainty in the world. Michael Crichton, “Author’s Message,” in State of Fear (2004)

• Love of certainty is a demand for guarantees in advance of action. John Dewey, in Human Nature and Conduct (1922)

• Inquiry is fatal to certainty. Will and Ariel Durant, in The Age of Napoleon: A History of European Civilization from 1789 to 1815 (1975)

QUOTE NOTE: The Age of Reason was the eleventh—and final—volume in The Story of Civilization, a monumental series begun in 1935. The first six volumes were published only under Will Durant’s name, the final five under the names of both husband and wife.

• There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty. Bart D. Ehrman, in God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (2008)

• As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Albert Einstein, in Sidelights on Relativity (1922)

• It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. Anatole France, quoted in David Pratt, Nobel Wisdom: The 1000 Wisest Things Ever Said (2007)

• In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin, in letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (Nov. 13, 1789)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation has been remembered by posterity, but it was originally part of a larger observation in which Franklin was hopeful—and far from certain—that the new American Constitution would succeed. Here’s the full passage: “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

• The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. Erich Fromm, in Man for Himself (1947)

• We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. Eric Hoffer, in The True Believer (1951)

• Fear comes from uncertainty. When we are absolutely certain, whether of our worth or worthlessness, we are almost impervious to fear. Eric Hoffer, in The Passionate State of Mind (1955)

Hoffer added: “Thus a feeling of utter unworthiness can be a source of courage.”

• Longing for certainty and for repose…is in every human mind. But certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law,” in Harvard Law Review (Feb., 1897)

• Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “Natural Law,” in Harvard Law Review (Nov., 1918)

• A reasonable probability is the only certainty. E. W. Howe, in Sinner Sermons: A Selection of the Best Paragraphs of E.W. Howe (1926)

• It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. T. H. Huxley, “Agnosticism and Christianity,” in Nineteenth Century magazine (June, 1889); reprinted in Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions (1892)

Huxley considered this the central principle of agnosticism, a term he coined. He concluded the observation above by writing: “This is what agnosticism asserts.”

• Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead. Carl Jung, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1970)

• They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves. Franz Kafka, a reflection of protagonist Josef K., in The Trial (1920)

• The one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable. John F. Kennedy, in State of the Union address (Jan. 11, 1962)

• We are never so certain of our knowledge as when we’re dead wrong. Adair Lara, “A Lot of Knowledge Is Dangerous, Too,” San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 9, 1997)

• One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure. Doris Lessing, “The Small Personal Voice,” in A Small Personal Voice: Essays, Reviews, Interviews (1975; Paul Schlueter, ed.)

• There are inquiries in which scanty evidence is worth using. We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread. C. S. Lewis, in Christian Reflections (1967)

• The highest probability amounts not to certainty. John Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

• It is wise to be sure, but otherwise to be too sure. Sophie Irene Loeb, in Epigrams of Eve (1913)

• There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain. W. Somerset Maugham, in The Summing Up (1938)

• Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. H. L. Mencken, in Minority Report (1956)

Mencken continued: “All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

• Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul/When hot for certainties in this our life! George Meredith, in the poem “Modern Love” (1862)

• There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life. John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859)

• The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof. Ashley Montagu, in Introduction to Science and Creationism (1984). Also an example of chiasmus.

• The only certainty is that nothing is certain. Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), in Historia Naturalis (1st. c. A.D.)

• The only thing that’s certain is the final curtain. Hart Pomerantz, in a personal communication (Oct., 2017)

• Since we can never know anything for sure, it is simply not worth searching for certainty; but it is well worth searching for truth, and we do this chiefly by searching for mistakes, so that we have to correct them. Karl Popper, in In Search of a Better World (1994)

• Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality. Bertrand Russell, “Don’t Be Too Certain,” in Am I An Atheist or An Agnostic? (1947)

• The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. Bertrand Russell, in Philosophy for Laymen (1946)

QUOTE NOTE: A moment later, Russell went on to add: “To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.”

• The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. May Sarton, the title character speaking, in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965)

• Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. Thomas Szasz, “œMental Illness,” in The Second Sin (1973)

Szasz continued: “The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.”

• I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Edward Teller, quoted in Istvan Hargittai, The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century (2006)

• A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found. Tzvetan Todorov, in Hope and Memory: Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2000, in French; English trans. in 2003)

ERROR ALERT: This is how the quotation appears in Princeton University Press’s English translation of Todorov’s Hope and Memory. Almost all internet sites, however, present the following version of the observation: “We should not be simply fighting evil in the name of good, but struggling against the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.”

• Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. Laurens van der Post, in The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958)

• Doubt is not a pleasant condition. But certainty is an absurd one. Voltaire, in letter to Frederick the Great (Nov. 28, 1770)

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation has been presented in a number of slightly different ways. In The Story of Philosophy (1926), for example, Will Durant presented the following translation: “Doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”

• Nietzsche said something marvelous, he said “Madness is not a consequence of uncertainty but of certainty,” and this is fanaticism. Elie Wiesel, in Nobel Prize interview with Georg Klein (Dec. 10, 2004)

• In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. Alfred North Whitehead, in Preface to Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)

Whitehead preceded the thought by writing: “How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things.”

• Only the madman is absolutely sure. Robert Anton Wilson, the voice of the narrator, in Masks of the Illuminati (1981)

(see also COUCH and FURNITURE and SOFA and TABLES and WHEELCHAIRS)

• I learned the importance of a man’s chair early in life. I learned that he may love several wives, embrace several cars, be true to more than one political philosophy, and be equally committed to several careers, but he will have only one comfortable chair in his life. I learned it will be an ugly chair. It will match nothing in the entire house. It will never wear out. Erma Bombeck, in Family—The Ties That Bind—And Gag! (1987)

• A house that does not have one worn, comfy chair in it is soulless. May Sarton, in Journal of a Solitude (1973)

• I wonder what chairs think about all day: “Oh, here comes another asshole.” Robin Williams, from his stand-up comedy routine

(see also ADVERSITY and CHANGE and DIFFICULTIES and GROWTH and HURDLES and OPPOSITION and TESTS and TROUBLE)

• A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache. Catherine the Great, quoted in Gamaliel Bradford, Daughters of Eve (1930)

• Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity. Stephen R. Covey, in First Things First (1994)

• It’s the rough side of the mountain that’s the easiest to climb; the smooth side doesn’t have anything for you to hang on to. Aretha Franklin, quoted in a 1964 issue of Ebony magazine (specific issue undetermined)

• There comes a time in the life of every human when he or she must decide to risk “his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor” on an outcome dubious. Those who fail the challenge are merely overgrown children, can never be anything else. Robert A. Heinlein, the narrator describing the challenge facing nurse Jill Boardman, in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

• For a long time it seemed to me that real life was about to begin, but there was always some obstacle in the way. Something had to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. Bette Howland, in W-3 (1974)

• I thrive on challenges, and there is no more imposing challenge for someone in my profession than winning an NBA title. Phil Jackson, in The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul (2005)

• Fortunately, any kind of setback has represented a challenge to do better, rather than an acceptance of inferiority on my part. Frances Parkinson Keyes, in Roses in December: The Memoirs of Frances Parkinson Keyes (1960)

• The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands art times of challenge and controversy. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Strength to Love (1963)

• Disasters will always come and go, leaving their victims either completely broken or steeled and seasoned and better able to face the next crop of challenges that may occur. Nelson Mandela, letter to Winnie Mandela (June 23, 1969); in Notes to the Future: Words of Wisdom (2012)

• You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

• None of us has the luxury of choosing our challenges; fate and history provide them for us. Our job is to meet the tests we are presented. Jerome Powell, quoted in The Wall Street Journal (April 27, 2020)

• You can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested. Robert J. Sawyer, the narrator and protagonist Thomas Jericho reflecting on a lesson learned in childhood, in Calculating God (2000)

• To be tested is good. The challenged life may be the best therapist. Gail Sheehy, in Spirit of Survival (1986)

Sheehy preceded the observation by writing: “Children may need challenges and high-risk conditions in order to develop the self-generated immunity to trauma that characterizes survivors.”

• Providence has hidden a charm in difficult undertakings, which is appreciated only by those who dare to grapple with them. Anne Sophie Swetchine, quoted in Frédéric-Alfred-Pierre (Count de Falloux), The Writings of Madame Swetchine (1869)

• The best indicator of your level of consciousness is how you deal with life’s challenges when they come. Through those challenges, an already unconscious person tends to become more deeply unconscious, and a conscious person more intensely conscious. Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

Tolle continued: “You can use a challenge to awaken you, or you can allow it to pull you into even deeper sleep. The dream of ordinary unconsciousness then turns into a nightmare.”

• If you cannot be present even in normal circumstances, such as when you are sitting alone in a room, walking in the woods, or listening to someone, then you certainly won’t be able to stay conscious when something “goes wrong” or you are faced with difficult people or situations, with loss or the threat of loss. You will be taken over by a reaction, which ultimately is always some form of fear, and pulled into deep unconsciousness. Those challenges are your tests. Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

• When such challenges come, as they always do, make it a habit to go within at once and focus as much as you can on the inner energy field of your body. This need not take long, just a few seconds. But you need to do it the moment that the challenge presents itself. Any delay will allow a conditioned mental-emotional reaction to arise and take you over. Eckhart Tolle in The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

• The fruit that can fall without shaking,/Indeed is too mellow for me. Mary Wortley Montagu, “Answer for Lord William Hamilton,” in The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 5 (1803)

• I’ve spent my whole life learning how to do things that were hard for me. Sonia Sotomayor, in My Beloved World (2012)

• Now civilizations, I believe, come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. They break down and go to pieces if and when a challenge confronts them which they fail to meet. Arnold J. Toynbee, in Civilization on Trial (1948)

• The very thing that seems to impede your progress can often be turned to account for you. Margery Wilson, in The Woman You Want to Be (1928)

• Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world. Mary Wollstonecraft, “Matrimony,” in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)

(see also TRIUMPH and VICTORY and WINNING)

• In sports, you simply aren’t considered a real champion until you have defended your title successfully. Winning it once can be a fluke; winning it twice proves that you are the best. Althea Gibson, quoted in Ed Fitzgerald, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody (1958)

(includes ACCIDENT; see also DESTINY and FATE and FORTUNE and LUCK and MISFORTUNE and NECESSITY and OPPORTUNITY)

• Accident accounts for much in companionship as in marriage. Henry Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

• They, believe me, who await/No gifts from chance, have conquered fate. Matthew Arnold, “Resignation,” in The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849)

• Chance is necessity hidden behind a veil. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880-93)

• Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign. Théophile Gauthier, in La Croix de Berny (1855; pub. in English in 1873 as The Cross of Berny: or, Irene’s Lovers)

QUOTE NOTE: Gautier was one of four authors of the novel (the others were Émile de Girardin, Joseph Méry, and Jules Sandeau,). The entire tale is told through correspondence between four fictional characters (Gautier signed his letters under the name Edgard de Meilhan). It is rare for literary partnerships to occur in works of fiction, and even rarer for them to be successful, but the book was very popular in its day. In the original English translation of the book, the chance line was presented this way: “Do not attempt to coerce chance; let it act, for perhaps it is the pseudonym of God.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all of major internet quotation sites mistakenly attribute the observation to Anatole France.

• For the happiest life, days should be rigorously planned, nights left open to chance. Mignon McLaughlin, in Atlantic magazine (July, 1965)

• No victor believes in chance. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science (1882)

• In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur, in inaugural address as Dean of the Faculty of Science, Univ. of Lille (Lille, France; Dec. 7, 1854)

QUOTE NOTE: In Ansel Adams: A Biography (2014), Mary Street Alinder says that this was Adam’s favorite aphorism, and one he often simply expressed as “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The saying is often mistakenly attributed to Adams.

(see SECOND CHANCES)

(see also ADAPTATION and BIRTH METAPHORS and CHANGING OTHERS/CHANGING OURSELVES and CONSISTENCY & INCONSISTENCY and EVOLUTION and GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT and PROGRESS and TRANSFORMATION and VARIETY)

• Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magic reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves. Diane Ackerman, in Cultivating Delight; A Natural History of My Garden (2001)

• Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom of responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance. Alfred Adler, “The Neurotic Disposition” (originally written in 1912); reprinted in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956)

QUOTE NOTE: People who are most stubbornly resistant to change, according to Adler, live their lives according a “life-lie” that has been concocted to safeguard their self-esteem and maintain the status quo. In his view, change was only possible after people confronted these fictions about themselves.

• Change means movement. Movement means friction. Saul Alinsky, in Rules for Radicals (1971)

• That’s the risk you take if you change: that people you’ve been involved with won’t like the new you. But other people who do will come along. Lisa Alther, the character Dr. Hannah Burke speaking, in Other Women (1984)

• The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970)

• The sad thing is that, even though we know our lives aren’t working in certain areas, we are still afraid to change. We are locked into our comfort zone, no matter how self-destructive it may be. Robert Anthony, in Beyond Positive Thinking (2007)

Anthony continued: “Yet, the only way to get out of our comfort zone and to be free of our problems and limitations is to get uncomfortable. We can only experience freedom in direct proportion to the amount of truth that we are willing to accept without running away.”

• There are some people that you cannot change, you must either swallow them whole, or leave them alone. Margot Asquith, in More or Less About Myself (1934)

• We would rather be ruined than changed. W. H. Auden, in The Age of Anxiety (1948)

• Be the change you wish to see in the world. Author Unknown

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites attribute this saying to Mohandas K. Gandhi, often in the phrasing, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” In The Quote Verifier (2006), Ralph Keyes writes: “Despite diligent searching, no one has ever found this saying in [Gandhi’s] published works.”

• A man marries a woman hoping she’ll never change—and she does. A woman marries a man hoping he will change—and he doesn’t. Author Unknown

• Before you’ll change, something important must be at risk. Richard Bach, in Messiah’s Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul (2004)

• He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. Francis Bacon, in “Of Innovations,” in Essays (1625)

• We must change in order to survive. Pearl Bailey, in Hurry Up, America, & Spit (1976)

• Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times (Jan. 14, 1962)

• Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. James Baldwin, in “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone” in New York magazine (Dec. 19, 1977); reprinted in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

• All changes are more or less tinged with melancholy, for what we are leaving behind is part of ourselves. Amelia Barr, in All the Days of My Life (1913)

QUOTE NOTE: It’s possible that Barr was inspired by a similar thought from an 1881 Anatole France novel, to be seen below.

• Youth is always sure that change must mean something better. Amelia Barr, in All the Days of My Life (1913)

• When you are through changing, you are through. Bruce Barton, quoted in Franklin Pierce Adams, F.P.A.’s Book of Quotations (1952)

• If I were to give off-the-cuff advice to anyone trying to institute change, I would say, “How clear is the metaphor?” Warren Bennis, “Why Leaders Can’t Lead,” in The Unconscious Conspiracy: Why Leaders Can’t Lead (1976)

• For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution (1907)

• Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? The Bible—Jeremiah 13:23

• Each new season grows from the leftovers from the past. That is the essence of change, and change is the basic law. Hal Borland, “Autumn’s Clutter,” in Sundial of the Seasons (1964)

• People who talk of new lives believe there will be no new troubles. Phyllis Bottome, in Old Wine (1925)

• A blossom must break the sheath it has been sheltered by. Phyllis Bottome, in The Mortal Storm (1938)

• Weep not that the world changes—did it keep/A stable, changeless state, ’twere cause indeed to weep. William Cullen Bryant, in “œMutation” (1824)

• All birth is unwilling. Pearl S. Buck, in What America Means to Me (1943)

• A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

QUOTE NOTE: The paradoxical notion that change is a method of conservation is one of Burke’s most enduring contributions. He returned to the theme two years later in a Jan. 3, 1792 letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, a member of the House of Lords: “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation.” Burke believed in gradual change, however. He continued: “All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.”

• There is always new life trying to emerge in each of us. Too often we ignore the signs of resurrection and cling to parts of life that have died for us. Joan Chittister, in In a High Spiritual Season (1995)

• The tragedy of life is that people do not change. Agatha Christie, the character Hercule Poirot speaking, in There is a Tide…. (1948; pub. in UK as Taken at the Flood)

• Everyone gets to be something by starting as something else—”either that or he stays unevolved. John Ciardi, quoted in Vince Clemente, “‘A Man is What He Does with His Attention’: A Conversation with John Ciardi,” in Vince Clemente, John Ciardi: Measure of the Man (1987)

• Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Henry Steele Commager, “We Have Changed—and Must,” in The New York Times April 30, 1961)

• What threatens our security is not change but the inability to change; what threatens progress is not revolution but stagnation; what threatens our survival is not novel or dangerous ideas but the absence of ideas. Henry Steele Commager,“The University and the Community of Learning,” speech at Kent State University (April 10, 1971)

• They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom. Confucius, in Analects (6th c. B.C.)

• Funny thing about change, it’s like pulling off a bandage. Hurts like hell when you do it, but you always feel better after. Danny Devito, as the character Merl Striker in the 2008 film Just Add Water (screenplay by Hart Bochner)

• It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same. Isadora Duncan, in My Life (1927)

• A belated discovery, one that causes considerable anguish, is that no one can persuade another to change [italics in original]. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal. Marilyn Ferguson, in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1987, 2nd ed.)

• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves: we must die to one life before we can enter into another! Anatole France, a reflection of the title character, in The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

• Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor. Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage,” in North of Boston (1914)

• Whenever you take a step forward you are bound to disturb something. You disturb the air as you go forward, you disturb the dust, the ground. You trample upon things. When a whole society moves forward this tramping is on a much bigger scale and each thing that you disturb, each vested interest which you want to remove, stands as an obstacle. Indira Gandhi, in Indira Gandhi: Speeches and Writings (1975)

• People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off. Paul Gibbons, in The Science of Successful Organizational Change (2015)

• All change is not growth; all movement is not forward. Ellen Glasgow, quoted in Barbara Jean Ringheim, Ellen Glasgow’s Interpretation of Human Action and Ethics As Reflected in Her Novels and Essays (1948)

• If a day goes by that don’t change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow. Woody Guthrie, quoted in Woody Sez (1975)

Guthrie preceded the observation by writing: “Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it.”

• The most powerful way to change the world is to secretly commit little acts of compassion. You must behave as if your every act, even the smallest, impacted a thousand people for a hundred generations. Because it does. Thom Hartmann, in The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now (1998; rev. ed. 2004)

• Yesterday people were permitted to change things. They will be permitted to advocate changing them tomorrow. It is only dangerous to think of changing anything today. Elizabeth Hawes, in Men Can Take It (1939)

• People change and forget to tell each other. Lillian Hellman, the character Anna speaking, in Toys in the Attic (1960)

• You can’t change the music of your soul. Katharine Hepburn, quoted in Lee Israel, “Last of the Honest-To-God Ladies,” Esquire magazine (Nov., 1967)

• We used to think that revolution is the cause of change. Actually, it is the other way around: revolution is a by-product of change. Change comes first, and it is the difficulties and irritations inherent in change that set the stage for revolution. Eric Hoffer, “The Madhouse of Change,” The Los Angeles Times (Nov. 6, 1967)

Hoffer continued: “To say that revolution is the cause of change is like saying juvenile delinquency is the cause of the change from boyhood to manhood.”

• In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists. Eric Hoffer, in Reflections on the Human Condition (1973)

• Even luxury finds a zest in change. Horace, in Odes (1st c. BC)

• If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world. Elizabeth Janeway, in Open Secrets (1972)

• For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Steve Jobs, Commencement address at Stanford University (June 12, 2005)

QUOTE NOTE: A year earlier, Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told he had only a few months to live. A few weeks later, though, further testing suggested that surgery might help, and after the operation was performed, Jobs thought he was in the clear. The experience profoundly shaped what he wanted to tell the Stanford grads in what was his very first Commencement speech.

• Change can be exhilarating, refreshing—a chance to meet challenges, a chance to clean house. It means excitement when it is considered normal, when people expect it routinely, like a daily visit from the mail carrier—known—bringing a set of new messages—unknown. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in The Change Masters (1983)

• The more things change, the more they remain the same. Alphonse Karr, in Les Guêpes (Jan., 1849)

• You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. Ursula K. Le Guin, the Master Hand speaking, in A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)

Here, in speaking about wizardry to young Ged, a wizard-in-training, the old Master is issuing a warning about the danger of changing things without having thoroughly thought things through. He continued: “The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow….” (ellipsis in original)

• There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, in The Wave of the Future: A Confession of Faith (1940)

Earlier in the book, Lindbergh had written: “Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.”

• As turning the logs will make a dull fire burn, so change of studies a dull brain. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Table-Talk,” in Driftwood (1857)

• We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person. W. Somerset Maugham, in The Summing Up (1938)

Maugham continued: “Mostly, different ourselves, we make a desperate, pathetic effort to love in a different person the person we once loved. It is only because the power of love when it seizes us seems so mighty that we persuade ourselves that it will last forever.”

• Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those changes that would make all the difference. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963)

• It’s the most unhappy people who most fear change. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966)

McLaughlin’s book also contained this observation: “Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality.”

• Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Margaret Mead, a signature saying

QUOTE NOTE: This may very well be the most famous quotation from one of history’s most famous women. The saying is so intimately associated with Mead that it has been registered to protect its use. The trademark is currently held by Mead’s granddaughter, Sevanne Kassarjian, who graciously permitted me to include the quotation in my 2011 book of Neverisms. Mead’s legendary saying is often followed by the words, “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has,” but that portion has not been trademarked.

The Institute for Intercultural Studies, which Mead founded in 1944, prominently features the saying on its website. An original source has never been found, but the Institute does provide this statement on its origin: “We believe it probably came into circulation through a newspaper report of something said spontaneously and informally. We know, however, that it was firmly rooted in her professional work and that it reflected a conviction that she expressed often, in different contexts and phrasings.”

ERROR ALERT: On a number of internet sites, Mead’s famous observation is erroneously presented in this way: “Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.”

• Isn’t it strange/That however I change,/I still keep on being me? Eve Merriam, “My, Myself, and I,” in Rainbow Writing (1976)

• People are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice. Robin Morgan, in Saturday’s Child: A Memoir (2001)

• Ignorance is always afraid of change. It fears the unknown and sticks to its rut, however miserable it may be there. In its blindness it stumbles on anyhow. Jawaharlal Nehru, in Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to his Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People (1949)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation came in a passage in which Nehru was talking about invention of the printing press and its impact on society. He preceded the thought by writing: “The more people read, the more they think…. And the more one thinks, the more one begins to examine existing conditions and to criticize them. And this often leads to an challenge of the existing order.”

• None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting to change all the tenor of our lives. Kathleen Thompson Norris, in Hands Full of Living (1931)

• When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it. Alan Paton, “The Challenge of Fear,” in Saturday Review (Sep. 9, 1967)

• As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it. Steven Pinker, in the Prologue to The Sense of Style (2014)

• Sometimes change came all at once, with a sound like a fire taking hold of dry wood and paper, with a roar that rose around you so you couldn’t hear yourself think. And then, when the roar died down, even when the fires were damped, everything was different. Anne Quindlen, in Object Lessons (1991)

• The moment of change is the only poem. Adrienne Rich, “Images for Godard,” in The Will to Change (1971)

• Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one’s own unnecessary vegetation. Gail Sheehy, in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976)

• If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. Gail Sheehy, in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976)

Sheehy continued: “It may mean a giving up of familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, relationships that have lost their meaning. As Dostoevsky put it, ‘taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.’ The real fear should be of the opposite course.”

• Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass. John Steinbeck, in Sweet Thursday (1954)

The words come from the narrator, describing how the character Doc was beginning to change “in spite of himself.” He continues: “Change may be announced by a small ache, so that you think you’re catching cold. Or you may feel a faint disgust for something you loved yesterday. It may even take the form of a hunger that peanuts won’t satisfy. Isn’t overeating said to be one of the strongest symptoms of discontent. And isn’t discontent the lever of change?”

• It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. John Steinbeck, in Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

• It is never too late—in fiction or in life—to revise. Nancy Thayer, in Morning (1989)

• Change is the process by which the future invades our lives. Alvin Toffler, in Introduction to Future Shock (1970)

• And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself. Leo Tolstoy, “Three Methods of Reform,” in Pamphlets: Translated from the Russian (1900; Aylmer Maude, trans.)

QUOTE NOTE: The quotation is also commonly presented this way: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” In both translations, it is the final portion of a fuller sentiment: “There can be only one permanent revolution—a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man. How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.” Thanks to Dave Hill of WIST for providing the original source.

• When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can’t make them change if they don’™t want to, just like when they do want to, you can’t stop them. Andy Warhol, in POPism: The Warhol Sixties (1980; with Pat Hackett)

• The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance. Alan W. Watts, in The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety (1951)

• Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative. H. G. Wells, in Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945)

• We can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what’s new. Margaret J. Wheatley, “Willing to Be disturbed,” in Turning to One Another (2002)

Wheatley continued: “Of course it’s scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing. If we can move through the fear and enter the abyss, we are rewarded greatly.”

• A single moment can change all. Christoph Martin Wieland, in Oberon (1780)

• There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go. Tennessee Williams, the character Lord Byron speaking, in Camino Real (1953)

• Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be. John Wooden, in Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court (1997; with Steve Jamison)

(see also CHANGE and FLIP-FLOPPING and PLEDGES and POLITICS)

• In politics, a mind can be a terrible thing to change. Marc Fisher, on political flip-flopping, playing off the famous slogan of the United Negro College Fund, in The Washington Post (May 28, 2012)

(see also CHANGE and FLAWS and INFLUENCE and INTRANSIGENCE and REFORM & REFORMERS and RELATIONSHIPS and STUBBORNNESS)

• Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom of responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance. Alfred Adler, “The Neurotic Disposition” (originally written in 1912), in The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956)

QUOTE NOTE: According to Adler, people who are most stubbornly resistant to change live their lives according a “life-lie” that they have concocted to safeguard their self-esteem and maintain the status quo. In Adler’s view, change was only possible after people confronted these fictions about themselves.

• All appears to change when we change. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, entry in Journal Intime (Feb. 5, 1853)

• God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me. Author Unknown, tweaking the famous “Serenity Prayer”

• You can’t grow somebody else up. Author Unknown, a popular saying from the Recovery movement

• Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. Author Unknown, but commonly attributed to Leo Tolstoy

• A man marries a woman hoping she’ll never change—and she does. A woman marries a man hoping he will change—and he doesn’t. Author Unknown

• Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock. James Baldwin, in “Every Good-Bye Ain’t Gone,” in New York magazine (Dec. 19, 1977); reprinted in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

• When you are through changing, you are through. Bruce Barton, quoted in Franklin Pierce Adams, F.P.A.’s Book of Quotations (1952)

• Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? The Bible—Matthew 7:3 (RSV)

QUOTE NOTE: This biblical verse began with the immortal words: “Judge not, that you be not judged.” (Matthew 7:1)

• Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others. Jacob M. Braude, in Braude’s Handbook of Stories for Toastmasters and Speakers (1975)

QUOTE NOTE: In offering this observation, Braude was almost certainly inspired by a fifteenth century thought from Thomas à Kempis (to be seen below)

• Never underestimate your power to change yourself; never overestimate your power to change others. H. Jackson Brown, Jr., in Life’s Little Instruction Book (1991)

• If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creatures, let him begin the long, solitary process of perfecting himself. Robertson Davies, the character Roberts speaking, in A Jig for the Gypsy (1955)

• Great mischief comes from attempts to steady other people’s altars. Mary Baker Eddy, “Wedlock,” in Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 (1896)

• There is, perhaps no surer mark of folly, than an attempt to correct the natural infirmities of those we love. The finest composition of human nature, as well as the finest china, may have a flaw in it; and this, I am afraid, in either case, is equally incurable; though, nevertheless, the pattern may remain of the highest value. Henry Fielding, the voice of the narrator, in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

QUOTE NOTE: This is my all-time favorite quotation on the subject of changing others. I cited it frequently in marriage counseling sessions back in the day, and I’ve used it as a helpful reminder to myself when tempted to engage in a reform effort. The narrator continued: “Upon the whole, then, Mr. Allworthy certainly saw some imperfections in the captain; but, as he wasd a bery artful man, and eternally upon his guard before him, these appeared to him no more than blemishes in a good character; which his goodness made him overlook, and his wisdom prevented him from discovering to the captain himself.”

• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves: we must die to one life before we can enter into another! Anatole France, a reflection of the title character, in The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)

• Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. John Kenneth Galbraith, “How Keynes Came to America,” in Economics, Peace and Laughter (1971); reprinted in The Essential Galbraith (2001)

• Do not worry about what others are doing! Each of us should turn the searchlight inward and purify his or her own heart as much as possible. Mohandas K. Gandhi, quoted in Louis Fisher, Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (1954)

• You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change. This is a truth I never seem to learn. Sue Grafton, a reflection of protagonist Kinsey Millhone, in T is for Trespass (2007)

Millhone introduced the thought this way: “In my experience, the urge to rescue generated aggravation for the poor would-be heroine without any discernible effect on the person in need of help.”

• I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself. Aldous Huxley, quoted in The Observer (London, July 2, 1961)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This observation has not been found in any of Huxley’s published works, so it may simply be an orphan quotation that has been attributed to Huxley to give it greater cachet. For more on the quotation—as well as some even earlier illustrations of the sentiment—see this Quote Investigator post by Garson O’Toole.

• Whereas I formerly believed it to be my bounden duty to call others to order, I must now admit that I need calling to order myself, and that I would do better to set my own house to rights first. Carl Jung, “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (a 1928 essay), in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

• If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Carl Jung, in The Integration of the Personality (1939)

• The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions. James Russell Lowell, in My Study Windows (1871)

• Changing ourselves is the most effective way to change others. Marvin Marshall, in Discipline Without Stress (2007)

• Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing his mind. W. Somerset Maugham, the voice of the narrator, in Of Human Bondage (1915)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the quotation is almost always presented in quotation anthologies. In the novel, it was preceded by these words: “The Vicar of Blackstable would have nothing to do with the scheme which Philip laid before him. He had a great idea that one should stick to whatever one had begun.”

• Every day of our lives we are on the verge of making those changes that would make all the difference. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963)

• Even if there were only two men left in the world and both of them saints they wouldn’t be happy. One of them would be bound to try and improve the other. That is the nature of things. Frank O’Connor, the opening words of the short story “Song Without Words,” in Argosy magazine (Dec., 1951); reprinted in Collected Stories (1982)

• The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. Carl Rogers, in On Becoming a Person (1961)

A moment later, Rogers went on to add: “We cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed.”

• I haven’t got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out. David Sedaris, in Naked (1997)

• Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. Thomas à Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ (c. 1420)

• If you want to make enemies, try to change something. Woodrow Wilson, in “Democracy of Business” speech at Salesmanship Congress (Detroit, Michigan; July 10, 1916)

• A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living. Virginia Woolf, quoted in Virginia Lee (2008) by Hermione Lee

• You can’t change people, but you can effect a change in them by your behavior. Garrison Wynn, a signature saying, first used in 2004 and repeated often in his talks and seminars; confirmed in a personal conversation (August, 2017)

• Change yourself and you have done your part in changing the world. Every individual must change his own life if he wants to live in a peaceful world. Paramahansa Yogananda, in Autobiography of a Yogi (1946)

(see also ORDER & DISORDER)

• Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit. Henry Brooks Adams, in The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

• When tempest-tossed, embrace chaos. Dean Koontz, a passage from the fictional Book of Counted Sorrows, in Dragon Tears (1993)

• Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer (1934)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented, but it was originally part of this slightly larger observations, made in the book’s opening pages: “When into the womb of time everything is again withdrawn chaos will be restored and chaos is the score upon which reality is written.”

• Chaos, if it does not harden into a pattern of disorder, may be more fruitful than a regularity too easily accepted and a success too easily achieved. Lewis Mumford, in Findings and Keepings. Analects for an Autobiography (1975)

• Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. George Santayana, in Dominations and Powers (1951)

(see also IDENTITY and INTEGRITY and MORALITY and REPUTATION and VIRTUE)

• It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific nation, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Abigail Adams, in letter to twelve-year-old son John Quincy Adams (Jan. 12, 1780)

QUOTE NOTE: Young Mr. Adams was in Paris at the time, accompanying his father, who had been dispatched to France to negotiate a peace treaty with Great Britain. Mrs. Adams, who wrote some of the most beautiful and moving letters ever written to her husband as well as to her sons, went on to add:

“All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the of the hero and the statesman.”

• Few men have the strength of character to rejoice in a friend’s success without a touch of envy. Aeschylus, in Agamemnon (5th c. B.C.)

• Those who assume a character which does not belong to them, only make themselves ridiculous. Aesop, “The Crow and Raven,” in Fables (6th c. B.C.)

• Adversity is the touchstone of character: it is not in success but in misfortune that hidden powers bear fruit. Mrs. Alec-Tweedie, in Sunny Sicily (1904)

• A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts. James Allen, in As a Man Thinketh (1903)

Later in the book, Allen expressed the idea more fully in this extended analogy: “As you cannot have a sweet and wholesome abode unless you admit the air and sunshine freely into your rooms, so a strong body and a bright, happy, or serene countenance can only result from the free admittance into the mind of thoughts of joy and good will and serenity.”

• It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over. Gertrude Atherton, in The Adventures of a Novelist (1932)

• Character is who you are when no one else is watching. Author Unknown

• Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones. Author Unknown, but widely misattributed to Winston Churchill

• Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness. Faith Baldwin, “July,” in Harvest of Hope (1962)

• Character…is the best security. Margaret A. Barnes, the character Granny speaking, in Within This Present (1933)

• Happiness is not the end of life, character is. Henry Ward Beecher, in Life Thoughts (1858)

• Character, like porcelain-ware, must be painted before it is glazed. There can be no change of color after it is burned in. Henry Ward Beecher, in Proverbs From Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

• My problem is I lack what the British call character. By which they mean the power to refrain. Alan Bennett, “An Englishman Abroad,“ in Single Spies (1989)

• In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation appears just after the epigram entry, said to be from “the learned and ingenious Dr. Jamrach Holoblom.”

• I make this distinction between character and reputation— reputation is what the world thinks of us, character is what the world knows of us. Josh Billings (Henry Wheeler Shaw), in Everybody’s Friend, Or; Josh Billing’s Encyclopedia and Proverbial Philosophy of Wit and Humor (1874)

QUOTE NOTE: Shaw, a New York journalist, adopted the name Josh Billings in the 1860s and became famous for a cracker-barrel philosophy that was filled with aphorisms written in a phonetic dialect (he called them “affurisms”). Mark Twain was a big fan, once even comparing Billings to Ben Franklin. Almost all of the Billings quotations seen today first appeared in a phonetic form and were later changed into standard English (the original form of this saying was: “I make this distinkshun between charakter and reputashun—reputashun iz what the world thinks ov us, charakter is what the world knows of us.”).

• We become familiar with the outsides of men, as with the outsides of houses, and think we know them, while we are ignorant of so much that is passing within them. Christian Nestell Bovee, in Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, Vol. 1 (1862)

Bovee also offered these additional observations on the subject:

“To great force of character there is often added a greater pride that impairs its influence.”

“It is only an error of judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to adhere to it when discovered.”

“Something of a person’s character may be discovered by observing when and how he smiles. Some people never smile; they grin.”

“It is with the finest characters as it is with the finest woods and marbles—the polishing hand is still needed to bring out the veins of beauty and of grace.”

“Much misconstruction of character arises out of our habit of assigning a motive for every action—whereas a good many of our acts are performed without any motive.”

• Sports do not build character. They reveal it. Heywood Hale Broun, quoted in James A. Michener, Sports in America (1976)

• Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Rita Mae Brown, in Sudden Death (1983)

The words come from the novel’s narrator, who continued: “Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free.”

• Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your character is what you really are, while your reputation is what others think you are. Dale Carnegie, in How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936)

• Golf puts a man’s character on the anvil and his richest qualities—patience, poise, restraint—to the flame. Billy Casper, quoted in Michael Hobbs, The Golf Quotation Book (1992)

• Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars. E. H. Chapin, quoted in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation was mistakenly attributed to Kahlil Gibran in The Treasured Writings of Kahlil Gibran (1995). Ever since, almost all quotation anthologies have repeated the error.

• The more peculiarly his own a man’s character is, the better it fits him. Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Officiis (1st c. B.C.)

• Strength of character does not consist solely in having powerful feelings, but in maintaining one’s balance in spite of them. Karl von Clausewitz, in On War (1832-34)

Clausewitz continued: “Even with the violence of emotion, judgment and principle must still function like a ship’s compass, which records the slightest variations however rough the sea.”

• Of all the properties which belong to honorable men, not one is so highly prized as that of character. Henry Clay, in The Clay Code: Or Text-Book of Eloquence (1844; G. Vandenhoff, ed.)

QUOTE NOTE: In the 1800s, it was common for books to have lengthy subtitles. The full title of this work was: The Clay Code: Or Text-Book of Eloquence, a Collection of Axioms, Apothegms, Sentiments, and Remarkable Passages on Liberty, Government, Political Morality, and National Honor: Gathered from the Public Speeches of Henry Clay.

• Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition, such as lifting weights, we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity. Stephen R. Covey, in First Things First (1994)

• No man knows his true character until he has run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan, and raised an adolescent. Marcelene Cox, in a 1995 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses. Quentin Crisp, in The Naked Civil Servant (1968)

• I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can’t smell character unless it stinks. Edward Dahlberg, “On Human Nature,” in Reasons of the Heart (1965)

• There is a kind of sweetness of character that stinks. Benjamin DeCasseres, “Fantasia Impromptu,” in The American Mercury (March, 1933)

• The man of character finds an especial attractiveness in difficulty, since it is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his potentialities Charles de Gaulle, in The Edge of the Sword (1960)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites contain the phrase a special attractiveness in difficulty.

• To be a character is amusing. To have character is sublime. Jim DeKornfeld, in personal communication to the compiler (Feb. 3, 2019)

• Character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs. Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect,” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

• It is only in romances that people undergo a sudden metamorphosis. In real life, even after the most terrible experiences, the main character remains exactly the same. Isadora Duncan, in My Life (1927)

• The discipline of desire is the backbone of character. Will Durant & Ariel Durant, in The Story of Civilization: The Age of Louis XIV, Vol. VIII (1963)

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this observation is mistakenly attributed to John Locke. In truth, the Durants were summarizing Locke’s approach to the education of children. They continued by writing: “This discipline is to be made as pleasant as possible, but it is to be insisted upon throughout [childhood].”

• We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the character of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearances in public; it is from their careless conversation, their half-finished sentences that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real character. Maria Edgeworth, in the Preface to Castle Rackrent (1800)

• Character is like stock in trade; the more of it a man possesses, the greater his facilities for making additions to it.

Tryon Edwards, in A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891)

• A man’™s character is most evident by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or reciprocate. Paul Eldridge, “Lanterns in the Night,” in The Jewish Forum (Aug., 1948)

QUOTE NOTE: Similar observations have been offered by Malcolm Forbes, Ann Landers, and Abigail Van Buren, but Eldridge is the original author of the sentiment. He presented a slightly modified version in his 1965 book Maxims for a Modern Man: “A man is most accurately judged by how he treats those who are not in a position either to retaliate or to reciprocate.” For more, see this 2012 Quote Investigator post from Garson O’Toole.

• It is hardly an argument against a man’s general strength of character that he should be mastered by love. George Eliot, the character Arthur Donnithorne speaking, in Adam Bede (1859)

Arthur continued: “A fine constitution doesn’t insure one against smallpox.”

• Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do. George Eliot, the character Mr. Farebrother speaking, in Middlemarch (serialized 1871—72; published as stand-alone novel in 1874)

QUOTE NOTE: In her 1859 novel Adam Bede, Eliot offered a thought about a person’s nature that also applies to the topic of character. The words come from the mouth of the character Adolphus Irwine, who says:

“A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.”

• No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Character,” in Essays: Second Series (1844)

• Character wants room; must not be crowded on by persons, nor be judged from glimpses got in the press of affairs, or on few occasions. It needs perspective, as a great building. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “œCharacter,” in Essays: Second Series (1844)

• People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• A man’s fortunes are the fruit of his character. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• Character itself lies deep and secret below the surface, unknown and unknowable by others. It is the mysterious core of life, which every man or woman has to cope with alone, to live with, to conquer and put in order, or to be defeated by. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in Vermont Tradition (1935)

• Talent develops in quiet places, character in the full current of human life. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Torquato Tasso (1790)

QUOTE NOTE: The observation has also been translated this way: “Genius is formed in quiet, character in the stream of human life.”

• There is nothing in which people more betray their character than in what they laugh at. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Elective Affinities (1809)

• Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete character. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in “What They Say,” Autumn Leaves (Jan., 1892)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This popular quotation—which now usually appears with the phrase complete a character at the conclusion—has not been found in Goethe’s writing, and it may be a paraphrase of what he thought rather than something he actually wrote. Autumn Leaves was a monthly publication aimed at Morman youth, popular in the late nineteenth century. To see the original publication, go to Autumn Leaves.

• There is an old-fashioned word for the body of skills that emotional intelligence represents: character. Daniel Goleman, in Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (1995)

In the book, Goleman also offered this thought on the subject: “The ability to control impulse is the basis of will and character.”

• Emotion doesn’t travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view. Sue Grafton, a reflection of the narrator and protagonist, Kinsey Millhone, in “I” is for Innocent (1992)

• A family library is a breeding-place for character. Graham Greene, “Background for Heroes” (1937), in Collected Essays (1969)

• Character demonstrates itself in trifles. Louise Imogen Guiney, in Goose-Quill Papers (1885). See the similar observation from Arthur Schopenhauer below.

• Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits. Thomas Hardy, the voice of the narrator, in The Return of the Native (1878)

• A person who has no genuine sense of pity for the weak is missing a basic source of strength, for one of the prime moral forces that comprise greatness and strength of character is a feeling of mercy. The ruthless man, au fond, is always a weak and frightened man. Sydney J. Harris, in On the Contrary (1964)

QUOTE NOTE: The French term au fond means: “at bottom” or “by one’s (or it’s) very nature.”

• It is an error to suppose that no man understands his own character. Most persons know even their failings very well, only they persist in giving them names different from those usually assigned by the rest of the world; and they compensate for this mistake by naming, at first sight, with singular accuracy, those very same failings in others. Arthur Helps, in Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd (1835)

• To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time. Katharine Hepburn, quoted in The Los Angeles Times (Nov. 24, 1974)

• A man’s character is his fate. Heraclitus, in On the Universe (6th c. B.C.)

• I have learned by experience that no man’s character can be eventually injured but by his own acts. Rowland Hill, quoted in Edwin Sidney, The Life of Rev. Rowland Hill (second ed; 1834)

• Resistance, whether to one’s appetites or to the ways of the world, is a chief factor in the shaping of character. Eric Hoffer, in The Ordeal of Change (1964)

• We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it much. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., in The Professor at the Breakfast-Table (1860)

• Reputation is what folks say about us: Character is what God knows about us. Marion Howard, in Perpetrations: Wise and Otherwise (1911)

• The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born. W. R. Inge, quoted in the Observer (London; June 21, 1929)

• Nothing discloses real character like the use of power. It is easy for the weak to be gentle. Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test. Robert G. Ingersoll, on the character of Abraham Lincoln, quoted by Allen Thorndike Rice, in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time (1885)

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, Abraham Lincoln is mistakenly quoted as saying: “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” The erroneous Lincoln quotation, which has been in wide circulation since the mid-1970s, was almost certainly constructed on the basis of Ingersoll’s observation. Ingersoll concluded by saying: “It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.”

• I have often thought that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!” William James, in letter to future wife Alice Howe Gibbens (June 7, 1877)

• It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. William James, in The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (1890)

• No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved. William James, “Habit,” in The Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (1890)

James went on to add: “There is no more contemptible type of human character that that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly concrete deed.”

• The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. William James, in Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899)

James went on to add: “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.”

• ’Tis true that tho’ People can transcend their Characters in Times of Tranquillity, they can ne’er do so in Times of Tumult. Erica Jong, a reflection of the title character, in Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980)

• Every man has three characters—that which he exhibits, that which he has, and that which he thinks he has. Alphonse Karr, quoted in Maturin Murray Ballou, Edge-Tools of Speech (1896)

• Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. Helen Keller, in Helen Keller’s Journal: 1936-1937 (1938)

QUOTE NOTE: In offering this thought, Keller was almost certainly inspired by a similar observation made centuries earlier by Goethe (see his entry above)

• The world may take your reputation from you, but it cannot take your character. Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, in Megda (1891)

• Reputation is what others think about you. What’s far more important is character, because that is what you think about yourself. Billie Jean King, quoted in Marlo Thomas, The Right Words at the Right Time (2002)

• I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Civil Rights March in Washington (Aug. 28, 1963)

• Knowledge will give you power, but character respect. Bruce Lee, in Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee’s Wisdom for Daily Living (2002; John Little, ed.)

• One stumble is enough to deface the character of an honorable life. Roger L’Estrange, in Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1692)

• Underneath this flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character. Oscar Levant, in Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965)

• We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious. In no other case are we so little inclined as here to wait until we have all the facts, and it is the whole which really constitutes character. G. C. Lichtenberg, in The Reflections of Lichtenberg (1908; Norman Alliston)

Lichtenberg continued: “I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off.” Alliston’s anthology also contains these other Lichtenberg reflections on the subject:

“I have invariably found that, all else failing, a man’s character can be deduced from nothing so surely as from a jest that he takes in bad part.”

“If men were to describe their dreams exactly we might perhaps learn much about their character. This would require, however, not merely one but a good number of dreams.”

“There is something in the character of every man which cannot be broken in—the skeleton of his character; and to try to alter this is like training a sheep for draught purposes.”

“People make a great mistake in trying to judge a man’s character or opinions from what he says and does in company. It is not always under the eye of a philosopher that we speak or act.”

• Character doesn’t just count. It is the password to every code you will ever need to crack. Reggie Love, in Power Forward: My Presidential Education (2015)

• Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character. James Russell Lowell, “Dryden,” in Among My Books (1870)

• Character is what emerges from all the little things you were too busy to do yesterday, but did anyway. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966)

• A man’s character is revealed by his speech. Menander, a fragment (4th c. B.C.), quoted in Menander, The Principal Fragments (1921; Francis G. Allinson, trans.)

• Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries. James Michener, the character Rosalind speaking, in Chesapeake: A Novel (1978)

• Character is what you are in the dark. Dwight L. Moody, quoted by his son William R. Moody, in D. L. Moody (1930)

QUOTE NOTE: In Respectfully Quoted (1993), Suzy Platt writes that a number of respected quotation anthologies say the observation came from one of Moody’s sermons, but scholars have not found it in any of them.

• No man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. John Morley, “Robespierre,” in Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1 (1886)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented, but it was originally the conclusion to an observation Morley made about the famous French political figure known mainly by a single name: “To run risks for chivalry’s sake was not in Robespierre’s nature, and no man can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character.”

• Character is the architecture of the being. Louise Nevelson, in Dawns + Dusks (1976)

• The shell is America’s most active contribution to the formation of character. A tough hide. Grow it early. Anaïs Nin, a 1946 entry, in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4 (1971)

• Character is much easier kept than recovered. Thomas Paine, in The American Crisis (April 19, 1783)

• Riches I may owe to Fortune; beauty, to my parents; but character I can owe only to myself. Ivan Panin, in Thoughts (1886)

• A man never reveals his character more vividly than when portraying the character of another. Jean Paul (pen name of Johann Paul Richter), the voice of the narrator, in Titan: A Romance (1803)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the modern translation of a passage that, a century ago, was more likely to be presented in English this way: “Never does a man portray his own character more vividly than in his manner of portraying another’s.”

• I think character never changes; the Acorn becomes an Oak, which is very little like an Acorn to be sure, but it never becomes an Ash. Hester Lynch Piozzi, from a 1797 letter, in The Piozzi Letters: 1792—1798 (1991; E. A. and L. D. Bloom, eds.)

• ’Tis from high Life high Characters are drawn. Alexander Pope, “Epistle to Cobham” [Sir Richard Temple, Lord Cobham], in Moral Essays (1731-35)

• Character is what a person is in the dark. Proverb (English)

• You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans. Ronald Reagan, quoted in The New York Times (Jan. 15, 1981)

• Perhaps there is no more important component of character than steadfast resolution. Theodore Roosevelt, “Character and Success,” in Outlook magazine (March 31, 1900); reprinted in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900)

Roosevelt continued: “The boy who is going to make a great man, or is going to count in any way in the after life, must make up his mind not merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.” The full article, still worth reading more than a century later, may be found at: Character and Success.

• Men best show their character in trifles, where they are not on their guard. It is in insignificant matters, and in the simplest habits, that we often see the boundless egotism which pays no regard to the feeling of others, and denies nothing to itself. Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in Tryon Edwards, A Dictionary of Thoughts (1891)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is the first appearance I’ve been able to find of a quotation that has become very popular. So far, though, I’ve been unable to find it in any of Schopenhauer’s writings. See the similar observation from Louise Imogen Guiney above.

• Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character. Norman Schwarzkopf, quoted in John C. Maxwell, The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth (2012)

• You can tell the character of every man when you see how he gives and receives praise. Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger), in Letters to Lucilius (c. 65 A.D.)

• There is a kind of character in thy life,/That to the observer doth thy history/Fully unfold. William Shakespeare, the character Duke Vincentio speaking, in Measure for Measure (1604-05)

• The best contact with humanity is through love and sex. Here, really, you learn all about life, because in sex and in love human character is revealed more than anywhere else. Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Richard Durgin, “Isaac Bashevis Singer Talks…About Everything,” in The New York Times (Nov. 26, 1978)

• It seems that the analysis of character is the highest human entertainment. And literature does it, unlike gossip, without mentioning real names. Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Richard Durgin, “Isaac Bashevis Singer Talks…About Everything,” in The New York Times (Nov. 26, 1978)

A bit later, Singer went on to explain: “We [writers], for some reason, always love to discuss and discover character. This is because each character is different, and human character is the greatest of puzzles. No matter how much I know a human being, I don’t know him enough. Discussing character constitutes a supreme form of entertainment.”

• There are many counterfeits of character, but the genuine article is difficult to be mistaken. Samuel Smiles, in Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

• Integrity in word and deed is the backbone of character; and loyal adherence to veracity its most prominent characteristic. Samuel Smiles, in Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

• Education has for its object the formation of character. Herbert Spencer, in Social Statics (1850)

• A good character is the best tombstone. C. H. Spurgeon, in John Ploughman’s Talk: Or Plain Advice for Plain People (1869)

Spurgeon continued: “Those who loved you, and were helped by you, will remember you when forget-me-nots are withered. Carve your name on hearts, and not on marble.”

• It is only an error in judgment to make a mistake, but it argues an infirmity of character to stick to it. Adela Rogers St. Johns, in Some Are Born Great (1974)

• One can acquire everything in solitude except character. Stendhal (penname of Marie-Henri Beyle), “Miscellaneous Fragments,” in On Love (1822)

• It is by character and not by intellect the world is won. Stephen G. Tallentyre (pen name of Evelyn Beatrice Hall), “D’™Alembert: The Thinker,” in The Friends of Voltaire (1906)

• It is ultimately character that underwrites art. Anne Truitt, in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982)

• The best index to a person’s character is (a) how he treats people who can’t do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can’t fight back. Abigail Van Buren, in a 1974 “Dear Abby” syndicated column

QUOTE NOTE: Four years later, Ann Landers (Van Buren’s sister) echoed the theme in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia (1978) when she wrote: “Keep in mind that the true measure of an individual is how he treats a person who can do him absolutely no good.”

• There is a nobler character than that which is merely incorruptible. It is the character which acts as an antidote and preventive of corruption. Henry van Dyke, “Salt,” in Counsels by the Way (1921 rev. ed.)

Van Dyke preceded the though by writing: “There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.”

• Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance. Kurt Vonnegut, a musing of the protagonist Eugene Debs Hartke, in Hocus Pocus (1990)

• Character is nothing but habit. Strong when habit is strong. Jessamyn West, the voice of the narrator, in South of the Angels (1960)

• The making of the substance called character was a process about as slow and arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge one’s descendants in, after they too were dust. Edith Wharton, a reflection of the character Nick Lansing, in The Glimpses of the Moon (1922)

• Nobility of character manifests itself at loop-holes when it is not provided with large doors. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” in A New England Nun (1891)

• True character arises from a deeper well than religion. It is the internalization of moral principles of a society, augmented by those tenets personally chosen by the individual, strong enough to endure through trials of solitude and adversity. Edward O. Wilson, in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998)

Wilson continued: “The principles are fitted together into what we call integrity, literally the integrated self, wherein personal decisions feel good and true. Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.”

• If you will think about what you ought to do for other people, your character will take care of itself. Character is a by-product, and any man who devotes himself to its cultivation in his own case will become a selfish prig. Woodrow Wilson, in speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Oct. 24, 1914)

• The only way…of really finding out a man’s true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself. P. G. Wodehouse, the narrator speaking, “Ordeal by Golf,” in Collier’s magazine (Dec. 6, 1919); reprinted in The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922)

(see also AUTHORS and BOOKS and LITERATURE and NOVELS & NOVELISTS and PLAYS & PLAYWRIGHTS and WRITERS and WRITING and WRITING & WRITERS—N.E.C.)

• A character or an idea has to grow like a seed and take possession…it’s something to do with one’s own development and passage through life. Daphne du Maurier, quoted in Margaret Forster, Daphne du Maurier (1993)

• The main characters in a novel must necessarily have some kinship to the author, they come out of his body as a child comes from the womb, then the umbilical cord is cut, and they grow into independence. Graham Greene, in Preface to Ways of Escape (1980)

Greene added: “The more the author knows of his own character the more he can distance himself from his invented characters and the more room they have to grow in.”

• My characters are galley slaves. Vladimir Nabokov in Paris Review article (Summer-Fall 1967)

QUOTE NOTE: Nabokov was replying to a question about E. M. Forster’s famous remark that his major characters sometimes take over and dictate the course of his novels.

• Contradictions in human character are one of its most consistent notes. Muriel Spark, the protagonist Fleur Talbot speaking, in Loitering with Intent (1981)

QUOTE NOTE: Talbot, working on her first novel and assisting Sir Quentin, another character, with his memoirs has discovered that the characters in Sir Quentin’s book “sounded stiff and false.” She went on to add: “Since the story of my own life is just as much constituted of the secrets of my craft as it is of other events, I might as well remark here that to make a character ring true it needs must be in some way contradictory, somewhere a paradox.”

(see also AUTHORITY and CHARM and LEADERS & LEADERSHIP and MAGNETISM)

• Charisma is the ability to persuade without the use of logic. Quentin Crisp, on Mae West, in How to Go to the Movies (1984)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation typically appears, but it originally came in the following fuller passage: “If charisma is the ability to persuade without the use of logic, then probably it was by this elusive power that Miss [Mae] West ruled with such apparent ease her chosen domain.”

• Lack of charisma can be fatal. Jenny Holzer, in Truisms and Essays (1983)

• Throughout history, certain people have seemed to possess an unusual, even inborn power to command attention. The Greeks called it charisma, meaning “gift,” and that sums up perfectly the popular view of this trait: that it’s something mysterious, not earned but given, by God or by fortunate genetics. Some people just seem to have it. Mark Oppenheimer, “Charm School,” in The New York Times (July 20, 2008)

• When the Cause Has Charisma, Shrinking Violets Bloom in Public. Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson, a section title, in Success Built to Last: Creating a Life That Matters (2007)

QUOTE NOTE: The concept of a noble cause has been around for some time, but Porras and his colleagues extended the idea by suggesting that a cause itself can have charisma. They went on to write: “œEnduringly successful people—whether they’re shrinking violets or swashbuckling entrepreneurs—serve the cause, and it also serves them. It recruits them and they are lifted up by its power. When that happens for you, a bigger, more engaging version of ‘you’ shows up.” A little later, the authors further explicated the idea by writing: “For the cause to have charisma, it must reach into your heart in a personal way to unlock all you have to give.”

• But charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them. Daniel Quinn, the title character speaking, in Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (1992)

• Marvellous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks. Anthony Trollope, the narrator describing Mrs. Butler Corbury, in Rachel Ray: A Novel, Vol. II (1863)

The narrator continued: “A woman so endowed charms not only by the exercise of her own gifts, but she endows those who are near her with a sudden conviction that it is they whose temper, health, talents, and appearance is doing so much for society. Mrs. Butler Cornbury was such a woman as this.”

• The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. Max Weber, in Economy and Society (1922)

QUOTE NOTE: Weber (1864-1920), one of the founding figures of the field of sociology, didn’t invent the term charisma, but he gets most of the credit for helping it become part of modern discourse. He continued: “These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader.’”

• We need less posturing and more genuine charisma. Charisma was originally a religious term, meaning “of the spirit” or “inspired.” It’s about letting God’s light shine through us. It’s about a sparkle in people that money can’t buy. It’s an invisible energy with visible effects. Marianne Williamson, “Surrender,” in A Return to Love (1992)

Williamson continued: “To let go, to just love, is not to fade into the wallpaper. Quite the contrary, it’s when we truly become bright. We’re letting our own light shine.”

(see also GENEROSITY and GIVING and KINDNESS and PHILANTHROPY and SERVICE and VIRTUE)

• While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary. Chinua Achebe, the narrator summarizing a belief of the character Ikem Osodi, in Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

• Charity is a virtue of the heart, and not of the hands, says an old writer. Gifts and alms are the expressions, not the essence of this virtue. Joseph Addison, quoted in The Guardian (Sep. 21, 1713)

Addison went on to explain: “A man may bestow great sums on the poor and indigent without being charitable, and may be charitable when he is not able to bestow anything. Charity is therefore a habit of good will, or benevolence in the soul, which disposes us to the love, assistance, and relief of mankind, especially of those who stand in need of it.”

• Charity, by which God and neighbor are loved, is the most perfect friendship. Thomas Aquinas, in Quaestiones disputatae: De caritate (Disputed Questions on Truth) (c. 1270)

• In charity there is no excess. Francis Bacon, “Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature,” in Essays (1625)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation appears on many quotation sites, but the full observation reveals that the observations is as much about excess as it is charity: “The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess, neither can angel or man come in danger by it.”

• Never let your zeal outrun your charity. Hosea Ballou, quoted in Puck (April 18, 1883)

• And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. The Bible: I Corinthians 13:13 (KJV)

• And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins. The Bible: 1 Peter 4:8 (KJV)

• We should be sure, when we rebuke a want of charity, to do it with charity. Christian Nestell Bovee, in Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, Vol. I (1862)

QUOTE NOTE: Bovee uses want in the traditional way here, meaning “to lack.”

• For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity. Charlotte Brontë, the voice of the narrator, in Shirley (1849)

• Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world. Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici (1642)

• For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity. Charlotte Brontë, the title character speaking, in Shirley (1849)

QUOTE NOTE: Prior to the publication of the novel, Shirley was almost exclusively a male name. In the book, the father of the female protagonist had expected a son and planned to name his son Shirley. When a female child was born, he decided to stick with the name. The popularity of the novel resulted in a great shift in child-naming patterns, and today Shirley is almost exclusively a female name.

• The highest exercise of charity is charity towards the uncharitable. Joseph S. Buckminster, in Sermons by the Late Rev. J. S. Buckminster (1814)

• Without all doubt, charity to the poor is a direct and obligatory duty upon all Christians. Edmund Burke, in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)

• Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity. Albert Camus, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Jean-Baptiste Clamence, in The Fall (1956)

• Did universal charity prevail, earth would be a heaven, and hell a fable. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, when alive, would part with nothing. Charles Caleb Colton, in Lacon (1820)

• That charity which longs to publish itself ceases to be charity. Eliza Cook, “Diamond Dust,” in Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. IV (1851)

• All zeal for a reform, that gives offense/To peace and charity, is mere pretense. William Cowper, “Charity” (1782); in The Complete Poetical Works of William Cowper, Esq. (1869; H. Stebbing, ed.)

• When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. Dinah Craik, in Christian’s Mistake (1865)

Craik continued: “We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.”

• In most cases, I have found charity to be another name for guilt feelings. Barbara D’Amato, in The Eyes on Utopia Murders (1981)

• Charity is really self-interest masquerading under the form of altruism. Anthony de Mello, in Awareness (1992)

• It is quite fitting that charity should begin at home…but then it should not end at home; for those that help nobody will find none to help them in time of need. Maria Edgeworth, “The Will,” in Popular Tales (1804)

• Charity is from person to person; and it loses half, far more than half, its moral value when the giver is not brought into personal relation with those to whom he gives. James Anthony Froude, the narrator and protagonist Markham Sutherland speaking, in The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

• Humility makes us charitable toward our neighbor. Nothing will make us so generous and merciful to the faults of others as seeing our own faults. François Fénelon, from an undated letter, in The Complete Fénelon (2008; Robert Edmonson & Hal M. Helms, eds.)

QUOTE NOTE: I’ve also seen the quotation translated this way: “Nothing will make us so charitable and tender to the faults of others as by self-examination thoroughly to know our own.”

• Charity begins, but doth not end, at home. Thomas Fuller, in The Appeal of Injured Innocence (1659)

• If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble. Bob Hope, quoted in a 1991 issue of Reader’s Digest (specific issue undetermined)

• Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless. Indeed, it is worse than useless. Aldous Huxley, in Ends and Means: An Inquiry Into the Nature of Ideals (1937)

QUOTE NOTE: Huxley famously continued: “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.”

• We live in a society which salves its conscience more by helping the interestingly unfortunate than the dull deserving. P. D. James, in Cover Her Face (1962)

• Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues. Hugh Kingsmill, “Rudyard Kipling,” in The Progess of a Biographer (1949)

• Charity…has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class. Doris Lessing, in Children of Violence: A Proper Marriage (1954)

• A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog when you are just as hungry as the dog. Jack London, “My Life in the Underworld: A Reminiscence and a Confession,” in Cosmopolitan magazine (May, 1907)

QUOTE NOTE: I’ve long been familiar with this popular London quotation, but not the story behind it. London was recalling his hoboing days in Nevada in 1892 when he discovered that he was more likely to receive charity from the poor than the well-to-do. Here’s the passage that preceded the observation above: “The very poor can always be depended upon. They never turn away the hungry. Time and again, all over the United States, have I been refused food at the big house on the hill; and always have I received food from the little shack down by the creek or marsh, with its broken windows stuffed with rags and its tired-faced mother broken with labor. Oh! you charity-mongers, go to the poor and learn, for the poor alone are the charitable. They neither give nor withhold from the excess. They have no excess. They give, and they withhold never, from what they need for themselves.” The full article may be seen here. Thanks to Carl Bell at Baylor University for making it available.

• We are obligated to be more scrupulous in fulfilling the commandment of charity than any other positive commandment because charity is the sign of a righteous man. Moses Maimonides, quoted in A Maimonides Reader (1972; Isadore Twersky, ed.)

• Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins. Horace Mann, in Thoughts (1867)

• One applauds the industry of professional philanthropy. But it has its dangers. After a while the private heart begins to harden. We fling letters into the wastebasket, are abrupt to telephoned solicitations. Charity withers in the incessant gale. Phyllis McGinley, in Saint-Watching (1969)

• In the economy of divine charity we have only as much as we give. Thomas Merton, in No Man Is an Island (1955)

• The other part of the true religion is our duty to man. We must love our neighbour as our selves, we must be charitable to all men for charity is the greatest of graces, greater then even faith or hope & covers a multitude of sins. We must be righteous & do to all men as we would they should do to us. Isaac Newton, “Of Humanity,” in A Short Schem [sic] of the True Religion (undated manuscript)

• The small charity that comes from the heart is better than the great charity that comes from the head. Ivan Panin, in Thoughts (1886)

• In Faith and Hope the world will disagree,/But all mankind’s concern is charity. Alexander Pope, in An Essay on Man (1733-34)

• Charity begins at home. Proverb (English)

QUOTE NOTE: This saying was already proverbial when Thomas Browne wrote in Religio Medici (1642): “Charity begins at home, is the voice of the world.” In the Yale Book of Quotations (2006), Fred Shapiro traces the origin of the proverb to John Wycliffe, a fourteenth century English divine, who wrote the following in English Works (c. 1383): “Charite schuld bigyne at hem-self.”

• Charity covers a multitude of sins. Proverb (English)

QUOTE NOTE: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations dates this proverb to the early 17th century, but it is clearly derived from the biblical passage: “Charity shall cover the multitude of sins” (I Peter 4:8). The saying is commonly interpreted to mean that many people are motivated to charitable action as a way to make amends for selfish behavior or to soothe a guilty conscience.

• Lots of people think they’re charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don’t want. Myrtle Reed, in Old Rose and Silver (1909)

• As for charity, it is injurious unless it helps the recipient become independent of it. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. quoted in S. J. Woolf, Drawn from Life (1932)

• Charity literally translated from the original means love, the love that understands, that does not merely share the wealth of the giver, but in true sympathy and wisdom helps men to help themselves. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in speech at Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, PA (June 27, 1936)

• Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it. George Sand, in Consuelo (1842)

• Ah! what a divine religion might be found out, if charity were really made the principle of it, instead of faith. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a remark made to Leigh Hunt, quoted in Hunt’s, Memoir of Shelley (1828)

• The essence of charity, he often thought, was not deciding what others needed and giving it to them, but giving them what they wanted. Jane Smiley, a reflection of the character Nils Harstad, in Moo: A Novel (1995)

• The reward of charity depends entirely upon the measure of loving-kindness in the act. The Talmud—Sukkah 49b

• Charity, to be fruitful, must cost us. Give until it hurts. To love it is necessary to give; to give it is necessary to be free from selfishness. Mother Teresa, in The Joy in Loving: A Guide to Daily Living (1996; Jaya Chalila & Edward Le Joly, eds.)

• He is truly great, that is great in charity. He is truly great, that is little in himself, and maketh no account of any height of honor. Thomas à Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ (c. 1420)

• All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty: for beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love. Evelyn Underhill, in Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911)

• It is not every one who asketh that deserveth charity; all, however, are worthy of the inquiry, or the deserving may suffer. George Washington, in letter to nephew Bushrod Washington (Jan. 15, 1783)

Washington introduced the thought by writing: “Let your heart feel for the afflictions and distresses of every one, and let your hand give in proportion to your purse.”

• Charity is an ugly trick. It is a virtue grown by the rich on the graves of the poor. Unless it is accompanied by sincere revolt against the present social system, it is cheap moral swagger. Rebecca West, in a 1912 edition of The Clarion (specific issue undetermined)

“In former times it was used as fire insurance by the rich, but now that the fear of Hell has gone along with the rest of revealed religion, it is used either to gild mean lives with nobility or as a political instrument.”

• Why is it that so many people think that charity consists in giving away merely what they cannot use instead of the article the recipient needs? Mabel Osgood Wright, a February 10 diary entry, in The Garden of a Commuter’s Wife (1905)

(see also CHEATING & CHEATERS and CON ARTISTS and DECEPTION & DECEIT and DISSEMBLING & DISSIMULATION and DISHONESTY and FALSEHOOD and FRAUD and LIES & LYING and SELF-DECEPTION and TRICKERY & TRICKSTERS and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

• A general must be a charlatan. Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte), in Napoleon in His Own Words (1916; Jules Bertaut, ed.)

• Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)

Sagan preceded the observation by writing: “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”

(see also BEAUTY and CHARISMA and INFLUENCE and MALE-FEMALE DYNAMICS and POPULARITY)

• There’s nothing more dangerous than a boy with charm. Christina Aguilera, lyric from the song “Candyman” (written with Linda Perry), on the album Back to Basics (2006)

The lyrics continue: “He’s a one-stop shop, makes the panties drop/He’s a sweet-talkin’, sugar-coated candyman.”

• Brains, integrity, and force may be all very well, but what you need today is Charm. Gracie Allen, in How to Become President (1940)

Allen continued: “Go ahead and work on your economic programs if you want to, I’ll develop my radio personality.”

• Charm: the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves. Henri-Frédéric Amiel, an 1883 entry in his Journal Intime

• “I judge people’s charm by the ease with which I express myself in their presence. Natalie Clifford Barney, “Scatterings” (1910), in A Perilous Advantage: The Best of Natalie Clifford Barney (1992; Anna Livia, ed.)

• It’s a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don’t need to have anything else; and if you don’t have it, it doesn’t much matter what else you have. J. M. Barrie, the character Maggie Wylie speaking, on charm, in What Every Woman Knows (1908)

• You must have this charm to reach the pinnacle. It is made of everything and of nothing, the striving will, the look, the walk, the proportions of the body, the sound of the voice, the ease of the gestures. Sarah Bernhardt, in The Art of the Theatre (1924)

Berhnardt concluded: “It is not at all necessary to be handsome or to be pretty; all that is needful is charm.”

• Charm is the next best asset after looks and brains—and can almost make up for looks. Helen Gurley Brown, in Having It All (1982)

• Charm is a glow within a woman that casts a most becoming light on others. John Mason Brown, in Vogue magazine (Nov. 15, 1956)

• Dad could charm a dog off a meat wagon. Rita Mae Brown, in Bingo (1988)

• You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question. Albert Camus, the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence speaking, in The Fall (1956)

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly present the observation this way: “Charm is a way of getting the answer yes without ever having asked a clear question.”

• charm should be on the surface. It has no hidden use. Ivy Compton-Burnett, in A Heritage and Its History (1959)

• Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm. Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise (1938)

• All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others. Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise (1938)

• O, popular applause! What heart of man/Is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms? William Cowper, in The Task (1785)

• It's always good to know, if only in passing, a charming human being; it refreshes one like flowers and birds and clear brooks. George Eliot, an 1850 journal entry; quoted in J.W. Cross, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885)

• Charm is a woman’s strength, just as strength is a man’s charm. Havelock Ellis, in The Task of Social Hygiene (1912). Also an example of chiasmus.

• Men get to be a mixture of the charming mannerisms of the women they have known. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Notebook E,” in The Crack-Up (1945; Edmund Wilson, ed.)

• Charm might be described as enlightened self-interest, a development of one's best self. Arlene Francis, in That Certain Something: The Magic of Charm (1960)

• In the simplest possible terms, I think genuine charm is an unmotivated interest in others. Arlene Francis, in That Certain Something: The Magic of Charm (1960)

• Counterfeit charm is worse than none at all. Arlene Francis, in That Certain Something: The Magic of Charm (1960)

• He had that nameless charm, with a strong magnetism, which can only be called “It.” Elinor Glyn, in the title story, in “It” and Other Stories (1927)

• Those people who rely on charm to get them what they want, who never need to work for love or admiration, what monsters they turn out to be! Rosemary Harris, in All My Enemies (1973)

• Charm is nebulous. It may be a mannerism; it may be a voice; it may be the movement of a hand. But whatever it is that makes a person charming, it needs to remain a mystery, particularly to the charmer, herself or himself. Rex Harrison, quoted in Alan F. Pater and Jason R. Pater, What They Said in 1977: The Yearbook of World Opinion (1978)

Harrison continued: “Because once the charmer is aware of a mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation. And good Lord, there is nothing less charming than affectations!”

• I lived in the midst of an affectionate charming family, and I am sure that there is no greater obstacle to a person who is just beginning to write. Katharine Butler Hathaway, in The Little Locksmith (1942)

• I don’t believe one can acquire charm. I think its very essence is naturalness. Louise Platt Hauck, in Without Charm, Please! (1936)

• Charm is an odorless perfume, which cannot be analyzed in the chemist’s test tube. It is a permeation, a radiation. It emanates from the climate of a warm human spirit, which not only contains light, but gives it off. Fannie Hurst, quoted in Arlene Francis, That Certain Something: The Magic of Charm (1960)

• Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn’t false. P. D. James, a reflection of the narrator, Dr. Theodore “Theo” Faron, in The Children of Men (1992)

• There are charms made only for distant admiration. Samuel Johnson, “Waller,” in Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–81)

• I was raised to be charming, not sincere. James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim, the Prince, replying to a question from his wife, Cinderella, about his infidelity, in Into the Woods (1986; book by Lapine; music & lyrics by Sondheim)

• Spilling your guts is just exactly as charming as it sounds. Fran Lebowitz, in Social Studies (1981)

• Oozing charm from every pore,/He oiled his way around the floor. Alan Jay Lerner, lyric from the song “You Did It,” in the play My Fair Lady (1956)

• People were not charmed with Eglantine because she herself was charming, but because she was charmed. Ada Leverson, in Love at Second Sight (1916)

• The rarest of all things in American life is charm. We spend billions every year manufacturing fake charm that goes under the heading of “public relations.” Without it, America would be grim indeed. Anita Loos, in Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974)

• Men who have a lot of charm have it in place of something real that you are eventually going to want from them and find that they do not have. Merrill Markoe, in How to Be Hap-Hap-Happy Like Me (1994)

• We are all born charming, frank, and spontaneous and must be civilized before we are fit to participate in society. Judith Martin, in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior (1982)

• Charming villains have always had a decided social advantage over well-meaning people who chew with their mouths open. Judith Martin (Miss Manners), in Common Courtesy (1996)

• Charm and nothing but charm at last grows a little tiresome, I think. It’s a relief then to deal with a man who isn’t quite so delightful but a little more sincere. W. Somerset Maugham, Deputy Commissioner Waddington speaking, in The Painted Veil (1925)

• Essayists must not only be succinct but have original ideas and, even harder to come by, or to fake, likable voices. Consciously or not, they endeavor to win us over by charm. Cyra McFadden, in a 1995 issue of The Boston Sunday Globe (specific issue undetermined)

McFadden continued: “If an essayist can not only charm but write the unforgettable sentence, one that reveals the heart in a few words, I'm her slave.”

• It’s innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn’t. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966)

• Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. Iris Murdoch, in A Severed Head (1961)

• Charm is simply the art of being pleasing. Patti Page, in Once Upon a Dream (1960)

• There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it. Dorothy Parker, “These Much Too Charming People,” in The New Yorker (April 21, 1928)

• An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit. Pliny the Younger, in Letters (1st. c. A.D.)

• Charm is the ability to make others feel attractive. Mary Pettibone Poole, in A Glass Eye at a Keyhole (1938)

• Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;/Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul. Alexander Pope, in The Rape of the Lock (1712)

• Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll;/Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul. Alexander Pope, in The Rape of the Lock (1712)

• Perhaps the basic thing which contributes to charm is the ability to forget oneself and be engrossed in other people. Eleanor Roosevelt, in If You Ask Me (1946)

• Charm is a cunning self-forgetfulness. Christina Stead, in House of All Nations (1938)

• Charming people live up to the very edge of their charm, and behave just as outrageously as the world will let them. Logan Pearsall Smith, in Afterthoughts (1931)

• Do you, by the way, know the difference between a beautiful woman and a charming one? A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you. Adlai Stevenson, quoted in a 1963 Newsweek magazine article (specific date undetermined); later reprinted in The Stevenson Wit (1966)

• Without charm there can be no fine literature, as there can be no perfect flower without fragrance. Arthur Symons, in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899)

• There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. Mark Twain, in Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935; Albert Bigelow Paine, ed.)

• Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind. Kurt Vonnegut, in Breakfast of Champions (1973)

QUOTE NOTE: The thought comes immediately after the narrator had described the early life of the character Kilgore Trout this way: “He made his living as an installer of aluminum combination storm windows and screens. He had nothing to do with the sales end of the business—because he had no charm.”

• It is absurd to divide people into good or bad. People are either charming or tedious. Oscar Wilde, the character Lord Darlington speaking, in Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)

Darlington, speaking to Lady Windermere, continues: “I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can’t help belonging to them.”

• All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction. Oscar Wilde, the unnamed narrator speaking, in “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (July, 1889); later republished in Lord Savile’s Crime and Other Stories, 2nd ed. (1901)

• Charm lies in complete forgetfulness of self. Margery Wilson, in The Woman You Want to Be (1928)

• “Charm,” she said, carefully and clearly, “is the ability to make someone else think that both of you are pretty wonderful.” Kathleen Winsor, the character Shireen Delaney speaking, in Star Money (1950)

(see also CONTENTMENT and DISPOSITION and GIVING and HAPPINESS and JOY and LAUGHTER and MIRTH and OPTIMISM and [Good] TEMPER and TEMPERAMENT)

• I think there is this about the great troubles—they teach us the art of cheerfulness; whereas the small ones cultivate the industry of discontent. Mary Adams, in Confessions of a Wife (1902)

• I have always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act, the former as an habit of mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent. Joseph Addison, “Cheerfulness and Mirth,” in The Spectator (May 17, 1712)

QUOTE NOTE: This was the opening line of the essay. In that first paragraph, Addison went on to write: “Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.”

• Have your fun, my dear; but if you must earn your bread, try to make it sweet with cheerfulness, not bitter with the daily regret that it isn’t cake. Louisa May Alcott, in Jo’s Boys (1886)

• Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves. J. M. Barrie, the narrator describing the character Leeby, in A Window in Thrums (1890)

• Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us. Charlotte Brontë, in Shirley (1849)

• I like the man who faces what he must,/With steps triumphant and a heart of cheer;/Who fights the daily battle without fear. Sarah Knowles Bolton, from the title poem, in The Inevitable and Other Poems (1895)

• Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us. Charlotte Brontë, the voice of the narrator, in Shirley (1849)

• Stay cheerful. Suffering makes lines in the face. Chris Chase, in How to Be a Movie Star or A Terrible Beauty Is Born (1972)

• Cheerfulness is to the spiritual atmosphere what sunshine is to the earthly landscape. I am resolved to cherish cheerfulness with might and main. Lydia Maria Child, in 1865 letter to Lucy Osgood, in Letters of Lydia Maria Child (1882)

Child began by writing: “To everything there is a bright side and a dark side; and I hold it to be unwise, unphilosophic, unkind to others, and unhealthy for one's own soul, to form the habit of looking on the dark side.”

• Be of good cheer, for sadness cannot heal the national wounds. Dorothea Dix, an 1845 remark, quoted in Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer (1975)

• Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor. Ellen Goodman, in Close to Home (1979)

• Life is getting through the moment. The philosopher William James says to cultivate the cheerful attitude. Now nobody had more trouble than he did—except me. I had more trouble in my life than anybody. But your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble, you'll probably make it through the next one. Ruth Gordon, in Paul Rosenfield, “The Careerist Guide to Survival,” The Los Angeles Times (1982)

• I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself. George Eliot, in Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

• The most manifest sign of wisdom is continued cheerfulness. Michel de Montaigne, in Essays (1580-88)

• Cheerfulness, sir, is the principal ingredient in the composition of health. Arthur Murphy, the character Gargle speaking, in The Apprentice (1756)

• Cheerfulness is a debt we owe to society, in the paying of which we receive a generous discount. We can not open our hearts to give out cheer without more cheer rushing in to take its place. Alice Hegan Rice, in Happiness Road (1942)

• But every road is tough to me/That has no friend to cheer it. Elizabeth Shane, in The Collected Poems of Elizabeth Shane (1945)

• I’ve always tried to be cheerful, because I think people who whine are boring, and I never could tolerate bores. Beverly Sills, quoted in Beverly (1987; with Lawrence Linderman)

In a 1975 interview on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes,” Sills also offered this observation on the subject: “A happy woman is one who has no cares at all; a cheerful woman is one who has cares but doesn’t let them get her down.”

• Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world. Ida M. Tarbell, in The Business of Being a Woman (1912)

(see also BREAD and BUTTER & MARGARINE and CAKES & PIES and COOKS & COOKING and DESCRIPTIONS—OF FOODS & PREPARED DISHES and DESSERTS and DINNERS & DINING and EATING and EGGS & OMELETTES and FOOD and GASTRONOMY and MEALS and MEAT and NUTRITION and RECIPES & COOKBOOKS and RESTAURANTS and SAUCES and SPICES & SEASONING and SOUPS & SALADS and SUPPER and VEGETABLES)

• Goat cheese…produced a bizarre eating era when sensible people insisted that this miserable cheese produced by these miserable creatures reared on miserable hardscrabble earth was actually superior to the magnificent creamy cheeses of the noblest dairy animals bred in the richest green valleys of the earth. Russell Baker, in The New York Times (Nov. 27, 1985)

• If antiquity be the test of nobility, as many affirm and none deny…then cheese is a very noble thing. Hilaire Belloc, “On Cheeses,” in First and Last (1911)

• A dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, in The Physiology of Taste (1825)

• Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. G. K. Chesterton, “Cheese,” in Alarms and Excursions (1910)

• A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality. Clifton Fadiman, in Any Number Can Play (1957)

• Apple pie without a piece of cheese is like a smooch without a squeeze. Stephen King, the character Irv speaking, in Firestarter (1980)

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly present the quotation this way: “A slice of pie without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze.”

(see Cooking & Cooks)

(see also COMPETITION and CONTESTS and GAMES and STRATEGY and VICTORY & DEFEAT and WINNING & LOSING)

(see also metaphors involving: ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BATHING & BATHS, BIRDS, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CANCER, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, HEART, ICEBERGS, JOURNEYS, MONTHS, MOTHERS, MOVIES, MUSIC, PARTS OF SPEECH, PATHS, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, SAILING & NAUTICAL and VEGETABLES, and WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

• After the game, the King and the Pawn go into the same box. Proverb (Italian)

• Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy. Siegbert Tarrasch, in The Game of Chess (1931)

(see also CANDY and SWEETS)

• Basically, gum is an adult pacifier. William Wrigley III, quoted in a 1988 issue of Forbes magazine (specific issue undetermined)

QUOTE NOTE: The author mentioned above was the grandson of William Wrigley, Jr., the founder of the famous chewing gum firm (the formal name of the company when founded in 1891 was The Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company). He headed the company until 1932, when his son, Philip K. Wrigley (known as “P. K.”) took over the helm. In E. Darby’s The Fortune Builders: Chicago’s Famous Families (1986), adult pacifier was identified as “P. K.’s phrase.” There is some evidence, though, that nobody in the Wrigley family authored the popular metaphor. The first appearance of the saying came in 1962, when the anonymous author of a Newsweek article wrote: “The most avid choppers of what could be described as an adult pacifier are between the ages of 18 and 34.”

(see also BOSTON and LAS VEGAS and LONDON and LOS ANGELES/HOLLYWOOD and NEW ORLEANS and NEW YORK CITY and PARIS and SAN FRANCISCO and WASHINGTON, DC)

(see also AMERICAN CITIES)

• Politics never takes a holiday in Chicago. Jane Byrne, in My Chicago (1992)

• This is the greatest and most typically American of all cities. New York is bigger and more spectacular and can outmatch it in other superlatives, but it is a “world” city, more European in some respects than American. John Gunther, on Chicago, in Inside U.S.A. (1947)

Later in the book, Gunther continued about The Windy City: “The last copy of the Chicago Daily News I picked up had three crime stories on its front page. But by comparison to the gaudy days, this is small-time stuff. Chicago is as full of crooks as a saw with teeth, but the era when they ruled the city is gone forever.”

• Was there ever a name more full of purpose than Chicago's? Jan Morris, “Boss No More,” Locations (1992)

Morris went on to add: “Spoken as Chicagoans themselves speak it, with a bit of a spit to give heft to its slither, it is gloriously onomatopoetic.”

• Chicago’s downtown seems to me to constitute, all in all, the best-looking twentieth-century city, the city where contemporary technique has best been matched by artistry, intelligence, and comparatively moderated greed. No doubt about it, if style were the one gauge, Chicago would be among the greatest of all the cities of the world. Jan Morris, “Boss No More,” in Locations (1992)

In her book, Morris also wrote: “Buildings are seldom just buildings in downtown Chicago, they are Examples, and not a city on Earth, I swear, is as knowledgeably preoccupied with architectural meaning. Where else would a department store include in its advertisements the name of the architect who created it, or a newspaper property section throw in a scholarly exposition of theoretical design?”

(see also BULLSHIT and BUNK and CRAP and FRIVOLOUS and HARASSMENT and PETTY and SMALL and TRIFLING and TRITE)

• Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse- or bull- of elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war. Paul Fussell, “Chickenshit: An Anatomy,” in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)

ERROR ALERT: Even though American historian Stephen E. Ambrose presented the first portion of this quotation—with full attribution to Fussell—in his Band of Brothers (1992), many internet sites mistakenly attribute the observation to Ambrose.

QUOTE NOTE: The quotation above is the conclusion of a fuller passage that began this way: “Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances.”

(see also CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and FATHERS & FATHERHOOD and MOTHERS & MOTHERHOOD and PARENTS & PARENTHOOD)

• When you’re the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. Russell Baker, “Life With Mother,” in William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth (1987)

Baker preceded the thought by writing: “I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families—sometimes into no family at all.”

(see also ADOLESCENCE and AGE & AGING and BOYS and BOYS & GIRLS and GIRLS and INFANTS & TODDLERS and TEENAGERS and YOUTH)

• In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again. James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)

• The first book that a child reads has a colossal impact. Joan Aiken, in The Way to Write for Children (1982)

In that same book, Aiken also offered this additional thought about children and their books: “Children read to learn—even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics, or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries; it is all new to them.”

• When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. Brian Aldiss, quoted in The Guardian (London; Dec. 31, 1971)

Aldiss added: “That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.”

• Home is that youthful region where a child is the only real living inhabitant. Parents, siblings, and neighbors are mysterious apparitions who come, go, and do strange unfathomable thing in and around the child, the region’s only enfranchised citizen. Maya Angelou, in A Letter to My Daughter (2008)

• Few persons can relate the story of their childhood without idealizing, or distorting, or overdramatizing the facts. Katharine Anthony, quoted in Helen Hull, The Writer’s Book (1950)

• Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives. Maya Angelou, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

• The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own. W. H. Auden, “Face, The Human,” in A Certain World (1970)

• You are only as happy as your most unhappy child. Author Unknown

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has become so popular in recent years that it is only a matter of time before it is referred to a a modern proverb. Despite my best efforts, I have been unable to find an original author or source.

• So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Reverie (1969)

• Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world, and thus a world event. Gaston Bachelard, in Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988)

• Children sweeten labors; but they make misfortunes more bitter. Francis Bacon, “Of Parents and Children,” in Essays (1625)

• Childhood is a thing that happens so early you don’t forget it. Everything else you grow out of, but you never recover from childhood. Beryl Bainbridge, quoted in Willa Petschek, “Beryl Bainbridge and Her Tenth Novel,” in The New York Times (March 1, 1981)

• Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them. James Baldwin, “The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman,” in Vogue magazine (April 1960); reprinted in Nobody Knows My Name (1961)

• To me there is no picture so beautiful as smiling, bright-eyed, happy children; no music so sweet as their clear and ringing laughter. P. T. Barnum, in The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like it in the Universe (2005; James W. Cook, ed.)

• However strong the seduction of treating children as adults, it is always a seduction to resist. Regina Barreca, in Too Much of a Good Thing Is Wonderful (2000)

• All children, except one, grow up. James M. Barrie, the opening sentence of Peter and Wendy (1911)

QUOTE NOTE: In 1902, Barrie introduced the character of Peter Pan in his novel The Little White Bird, but it was only a minor role, and Peter never advanced beyond infancy. Two years later, he developed Peter into the character we all know today for the 1904 London stage production, “Peter Pan, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up.” The play was a spectacular success, and catapulted Barrie into worldwide celebrity.

In 1911, Peter Pan was already one of the world’s most famous fictional characters when Barrie extended the stage play into a full-blown novel titled Peter and Wendy. The novel’s opening line is now regarded as a classic in world literature. What is less well known, though, is how Barrie continued the first paragraph:

“They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, ‘Oh, why can’t you remain like this forever!’ This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up.”

• The best inheritance a parent can give his children is a few minutes of his time each day.  O. A. Battista, quoted in Sidney Greenberg, A Treasury of the Art of Living (1963)

• When we are young our parents run our life; when we get older, our children do. Vicki Baum, in I Know What I’m Worth (1964)

QUOTE NOTE: This is a perfectly fine observation in its own right, but when I first came upon it many years ago, I misread it as ruin rather than run. I even remember thinking at the time that it was even better in my misread version. Imagine my surprise and delight, then, when I ultimately came across a remark attributed to Clarence Darrow: “The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second half is ruined by our children” (see the Darrow entry below)

• When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. The Bible: 1 Corinthians 13:11 (KJV)

The Revised Standard Version (RSV) has this translation: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”

• Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. The Bible: Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)

• Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)

• But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell. Louise Bogan, “Childhood’s False Eden,” in Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955)

QUOTE NOTE: Bogan was referring specifically to the life and struggles of writer Katherine Mansfield, but her observation has wide applicability.

• I firmly believe kids don’t want your understanding. They want your trust, your compassion, your blinding love and your car keys, but you try to understand them and you’re in big trouble. Erma Bombeck, in If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1971)

• A child develops individuality long before he develops taste. I have seen my kid straggle into the kitchen in the morning with outfits that need only one accessory: an empty gin bottle. Erma Bombeck, in If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1971)

• Kids need love the most when they deserve it the least. Erma Bombeck, quoted in Jerry Dunn, Tricks of the Trade (1991)

• What are so mysterious as the eyes of a child? Phyllis Bottome, “Brother Leo,” in Innocence and Experience (1934)

• What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born. Pearl S. Buck, in Children for Adoption (1964)

• The place is very well and quiet and the children only scream in a low voice. Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron), in letter to Lady Melbourne (Sep. 21, 1813); reprinted in Byron’s Letters and Journals, Vol. 3 (1974; L. A. Marchand, ed.)

• If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder…he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in. Rachel Carson, in The Sense of Wonder(1965)

• A wise woman once said to me that there are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these she said is roots, the other, wings. W. Hodding Carter II, in Where Main Street Meets the River (1953)

ERROR ALERT: On almost all internet sites, the a wise woman portion is omitted, and the quotation is directly attributed to Carter, most often in the following way: “There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children: one of these is roots, the other, wings.”

• The actual American childhood is less Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney than Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Susan Cheever, in A Woman’s Life (1994)

• The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years. Agatha Christie, the character Dr. Reilly, in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936)

• More children suffer from interference than from non-interference. Agatha Christie, the character Charles Hayward speaking, in The Crooked House (1949)

• If you’ve had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you. Agatha Christie, in A Pocket Full of Rye (1953)

• One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy childhood. Agatha Christie, in An Autobiography (1977)

• It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place. Colette, “The Priest on the Wall,” in My Mother’s House (1922)

• It is a mystery why adults expect perfection from children. Few grownups can get through a whole day without making a mistake. Marcelene Cox, in a 1943 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• A child who constantly hears “Don’t,” “Be careful,” “Stop will eventually be overtaken by schoolmates, business associates, and rival suitors. Marcelene Cox, in a 1943 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Children whose problems aren’t recognized become problem children. Marcelene Cox, in a 1944 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• A child can never be better than what his parents think of him. Marcelene Cox, in a 1945 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Children should not be condemned for accidents. Compared with an adult, the child is all left hand. Marcelene Cox, in a 1945 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• To give children everything is often worse than giving them nothing. Marcelene Cox, in a 1947 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Children always take the line of most persistence. Marcelene Cox, in a 1947 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there’s always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires. Marcelene Cox, in a 1955 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Two important things to teach a child: to do and to do without. Marcelene Cox, in a 1957 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal (specific issue undetermined)

• Little seedlings never flourish in the soil they have been given, be it ever so excellent, if they are continually pulled up to see if the roots are grateful yet. Bertha Damon, in Grandma Called It Carnal (1938)

• For though the first half of our lives is ruined by our parents, the second half is ruined by our children. Clarence Darrow, quoted in Changing Times magazine (July, 1878)

QUOTE NOTE: I have not been able to find an original source for this popular remark, and it just may be apocryphal. In the Changing Times piece, editor Sidney Sulkin cites it in "Chat with the Editor," an imaginary conversation he has with Darrow, Shaw, Twain, and John Milton.

• How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children. Charles Darwin, in letter to W. D. Fox (March 7, 1852)

• Young children have no sense of wonder. They bewilder well, but few things surprise them. All of it is new to young children, after all, and equally gratuitous. Annie Dillard, in An American Childhood (1987)

• Cleaning your house/While your kids are still growing/Is like shoveling the walk/Before it stops snowing. Phyllis Diller, in Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints (1966)

• Those who cannot remember clearly their own childhood are poor educators. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, in Aphorisms (1880)

• Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown. George Eliot, in an 1844 letter, reprinted in George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885; J.W. Cross, ed.)

• Children are all foreigners. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an 1839 journal entry

• We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life (1860)

• Children “fall apart” repeatedly, and unlike Humpty Dumpty, grow together again. Erik Erikson, quoted in M. J. E. Senn, Symposium on Healthy Personality (1950)

• I rarely think about my childhood. It’s a slippery thing I can’t keep hold of for long—it slithers out of my grasp. And a lot of the time I remember what was missing instead of what was there. I am a chronicler of absence. Carrie Fisher, in Delusions of Grandma (1994)

• A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort. Gillian Flynn, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Camille Preaker, in Sharp Objects (2006)

• Let your children go if you want to keep them. Malcolm Forbes, quoted in William Safire and Leonard Safir, Words of Wisdom: More Good Advice (1989)

• Your children are not your children/They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself./They come through you but not from you,/And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. Kahlil Gibran, “On Children.” in The Prophet (1923)

This is the beginning of the Prophet’s answer to a woman who said, “Speak to us of Children.” He continued: “You may give them your love but not your thoughts,/For they have their own thoughts./You may house their bodies but not their souls,/For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.”

And then, as he begins the final portion of his answer, he added: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

• Becoming a parent is like discovering a new room in the house of your soul, where you were certain there wasn’t one. Emily Giffin, in Baby Proof (2010)

• Children are unreliable, foreigners to discretion. Anthony Gilbert (pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson), in Is She Dead Too? (1950)

• Everything matters terribly to children, you know, they’re fresh and unformed. Dorothy Gilman, the title character speaking, in A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax (1973)

• Children…are like wet cement. Any word that falls on them makes an impact. Haim Ginott, in Between Parent and Child (1965)

ERROR ALERT: In almost all quotation anthologies, this quotation appears without an ellipsis and is mistakenly phrased as if it ends Whatever falls on them makes an impression.

• Hurts of childhood live on; in one form or other they are there to the end. Susan Glaspell, the voice of the narrator, in The Morning Is Near Us (1939)

• If children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but geniuses. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in The Autobiography of Goethe (Eng. ed. pub. posthumously in 1848)

QUOTE NOTE: Goethe preceded the thought by writing: “The child…seems so intelligent and rational, and at the same time so easy, cheerful, and clever, that one can hardly wish it further cultivation.”

• Childhood is a disease—a sickness that you grow out of. William Golding, quoted in The Guardian (London; June 22, 1990)

• Children are incurable romantics. Brimful of romance and tragedy, we whirl through childhood hopelessly in love with our parents. Roger Gould, in Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life (1978)

Gould continued: “In our epic imagination, we love and are loved with a passion so natural and innocent we may never know its like as adults.”

• There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. Graham Greene, in The Power and the Glory (1940)

QUOTE NOTE: Graham returned to the theme of a life-altering childhood moment nearly two decades later when he wrote in Our Man in Havana (1958): “Who knows whether there may not be a moment in childhood when the world changes forever, like making a face when the clock strikes?”

• It is impossible to betray another man’s child—for whatever reason—without also betraying one’s own. To do less than justice to another man’s child, no matter who that man is, is to impair by that much the chances one’s own children have for a life of meaning and purpose. Margaret Halsey, in The Folks at Home (1952)

• Children hold us hostage; they represent our commitment to the future. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in Italian Days (1989)

• Bringing a child into the world is the greatest act of hope there is. Louise Hart, “Postscript: On Nightmares,” in The Winning Family: Increasing Self-Esteem in Your Children and Yourself (1987)

• Perhaps we have been misguided into taking too much responsibility from our children, leaving them too little room for discovery. Helen Hayes, in A Gift of Joy (1965; with Lewis Funk)

• Childhood is a short season. Helen Hayes, in Loving Life (with M. G. Gladney, 1987)

• Children are not only innocent and curious but also optimistic and joyful and essentially happy. They are, in short, everything adults wish they could be. Carolyn Haywood, in B is for Betsy (1939)

• Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. Lillian Hellman, in Pentimento (1973)

Hellman continued: “For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.”

• No one knows you like a person with whom you’ve shared a childhood. No one will ever understand you in quite the same way. Alice Hoffman, in Practical Magic (1995)

• Anyone who has raised more than one child knows full well that kids turn out the way they turn out—astonishingly, for the most part, and usually quite unlike their siblings, even their twins, raised under the same flawed rooftree. Barbara Holland, in Endangered Pleasures: In Defense of Naps, Bacon, Martinis, Profanity, and Other Indulgences (1995)

Holland continued: “Little we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, seems to have made much mark. It’s hubris to suppose ourselves so influential; a casual remark on the playground is as likely to change their lives as any dedicated campaign of ours. They come with much of their own software already in place, waiting, and none of the keys we press will override it.”

• A sibling is the lens through which you see your childhood. Ann Hood, in Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time (2000)

• Children aren’t coloring books. You don’t get to fill them with your favorite colors. Khaled Hosseini, the character Rahim Khan speaking, in The Kite Runner (2003)

• If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers. Edgar Watson Howe, in Country Town Sayings (1911)

• Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in light out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. Eugène Ionesco, in Fragments of a Journal (1968)

Ionesco continued: “When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become adult. The brave new world, the wonderland has grown trite and commonplace.”

• Childhood is the one prison from which there’s no escape, the one sentence from which there’s no appeal. We all serve our time. P. D. James, the voice of the narrator, in Innocent Blood (1980)

• If from infancy you treat children as gods they are liable in adulthood to act as devils. P. D. James, a diary entry by Dr. Theodore “Theo” Faron, in The Children of Men (1992)

• What a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give. P. D. James, in Time To Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (1999)

QUOTE NOTE: James was actually thinking about her father when she wrote these powerful words. Here’s the original passage: “I don’t think he had known much demonstrative love in his childhood and what a child doeasn’t receive he can seldom later give.”

• Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives. P. D. James, in Time To Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography (1999)

• Childhood does sometimes pay a second visit to man—youth never. Anna Brownell Jameson, quoted in Edward Parsons Day, Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884)

• Children have more need of models than of critics. Joseph Joubert

• If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Carl Jung, in The Integration of the Personality (1939)

• Warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. Carl Jung, “The Gifted Child,” lecture in Basel, Switzerland (Dec. 1942); reprinted in The Development of Personality (1954)

Jung preceded the thought by saying: “One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings”

• The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old. Jean Kerr, in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957)

• At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experiences of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses. Ellen Key, in The Century of the Child (1909)

• A child’s nature is too serious a thing to admit of its being regarded as a mere appendage to another human being. Charles Lamb, “A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People,” in Essays of Elia (1823)

• A child is fed with milk and praise. Mary Ann Lamb, “The First Tooth,” in Poetry for Children (1809)

• Children have an uncanny way of living up—or down—to what is expected of them. Ann Landers, in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia (1978)

• Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. Fran Lebowitz, in Metropolitan Life (1974)

Lebowitz made several other wry observations about children in the book:

“All God’s children are not beautiful. Most of God’s children are, in fact, barely presentable.”

“Children make the most desirable opponents in Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.”

“Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one’s own interest in the topic has waned.”

• A torn jacket is soon mended; but hard words bruise the heart of a child. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Table-Talk,” in Driftwood (1857)

• Do you remember your childhood? I am always coming across these marvelous accounts by writers who declare that they remember “everything.” Katherine Mansfield, “A Married Man's Story,” in The Doves' Nest (1923)

The narrator continued: “I certainly don't. The dark stretches, the blanks, are much bigger than the bright glimpses. I seem to have spent most of my time like a plant in a cupboard.”

• Adorable children are considered to be the general property of the human race. (Rude children belong to their mothers.) Judith Martin, in Miss Manners’ Guide to Rearing Perfect Children (1984)

• Children are forced to live very rapidly in order to live at all. They are given only a few years in which to learn hundreds of thousands of things about life and the planet and themselves. Phyllis McGinley, in Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964)

• The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes. Carson McCullers, in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1953)

• The fault no child ever loses is the one he was most punished for. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963)

• There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963)

• Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations. Nellie McClung, in The Stream Runs Fast (1945)

• The ability to forget a sorrow is childhood’s most enchanting feature. Phyllis McGinley, in Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964)

• Even in the same family, one child will always instinctively know when to ask for things, and another won’t. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Neurotic’s Notebook (1963)

• Likely as not, the child you can do the least with will do the most to make you proud. Mignon McLaughlin, in The Second Neurotic’s Notebook (1966)

• Children must be taught how to think, not what to think. Margaret Mead, in Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

• The way in which each human infant is transformed into the finished adult, into the complicated individual version of his city and his century is one of the most fascinating studies open to the curious minded. Margaret Mead, a 1929 observation, quoted in Edward Rice, Margaret Mead: A Portrait (1979)

• What’s done to children, they will do to society. Karl A. Menninger, quoted in Reader’s Digest Quotable Quotes (1997)

• The child has a primary need to be regarded and respected as the person he really is at any given time, and as the center—the central actor—in his own activity. Alice Miller, in Prisoners of Childhood (1979)

In the book, Miller also wrote: “Every child has a legitimate narcissistic need to be noticed, understood, taken seriously, and respected by his mother. In the first weeks and months of life he needs to have the mother at his disposal, must be able to use her and to be mirrored by her.”

• Someday we will regard our children not as creatures to manipulate or to change but rather as messengers from a world we once deeply knew, but which we have long since forgotten, who can reveal to us more about the true secrets of life, and also our own lives, than our parents were ever able to. Alice Miller, in the Preface to For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (1983)

• I love children, especially when they cry, because then somebody takes them away. Nancy Mitford, “The Tourist” (1959), in The Water Beetle (1962)

• It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity. Michel de Montaigne, in Essays (1580)

• Children see magic because they look for it. Christopher Moore, the voice of the narrator and protagonist, in Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal (2002)

• Having children is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain. Martin Mull, from his stand-up routine, quoted in Orange Coast magazine (Dec., 1986)

• Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies./Nobody that matters, that is. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies,” in Wine From These Grapes (1934)

Millay preceded this by writing: “Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age/The child is grown and puts away childish things.”

• The childhood shows the man,/As morning shows the day. John Milton, in Paradise Regained (1671)

• To children childhood holds no particular advantage. Kathleen Thompson Norris, in Hands Full of Living (1931)

• The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. Alden Nowlan, in “Scratchings“ (1971)

• After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world. Mary Oliver, in Blue Pastures (1995)

• If you bungle raising your children I don't think whatever else you do well matters very much. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in an NBC News interview (Oct. 1, 1960)

• What a father says to his children is not heard by the world; but it will be heard by posterity. Jean Paul (pen name of Johann Paul Richter), in Levana (1807)

• Men are generally more careful of the breed of their horses and dogs than of their children. William Penn, in Some Fruits of Solitude (1693)

• Having children is rolling the dice hoping for a seven to appear. Hart Pomerantz, in a personal communication (March 3, 2024)

• Childhood is the fiery furnace in which we are melted down to essentials and that essential shaped for good. Katherine Anne Porter, “Reflections on Willa Cather,” in The Days Before (1952)

In that same essay, Porter wrote: “I have not much interest in anyone’s personal history after the tenth year, not even my own. Whatever one was going to be was all prepared for before that.”

• Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. Neil Postman, in Introduction to The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

QUOTE NOTE: There are many wonderful quotations about children, but I regard this as The Single Best Thing Ever Said on the subject. I have no way of knowing for certain, but I have a feeling Postman might have been inspired by a somewhat similar observation in Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923): “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

• Children are poor men’s riches. Proverb (English)

• Children are to be respected and I respect them deeply. They’ve taught me an awful lot. Fred Rogers, in a 1983 interview with Joan Rivers on The Tonight Show

• To understand children, we must have some memory of how we felt as children. Theodore Isaac Rubin, in Love Me, Love My Fool (1976)

• Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. George Santayana, “Reason in Society,” in The Life of Reason (1905-06)

• Childhood decides. Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Words: The Autobiography of Jean-Paul Sartre (1964)

• How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is/To have a thankless child. William Shakespeare, the title character speaking, in King Lear (1605-06)

• Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head. James E. Shapiro, in Meditations From the Breakdown Lane (1983)

ERROR ALERT: Numerous internet sites mistakenly attribute this quotation to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr

• Although today there are many trial marriages, as Gary Wills says, there is no such thing as a trial child. Gail Sheehy in Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (1976)

• These things I do despise:/Hypocrisy and lies,/And anything at all that dims/The light in children’s eyes. Ruth T. Stamper, quoted in a 1976 issue of Reader’s Digest (specific issue undetermined)

• Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father. Gloria Steinem, quoted in The New York Times (Aug. 26, 1971)

• It’s never too late for a happy childhood. Gloria Steinem, in Revolution From Within (1993)

• Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Elizabeth Stone, quoted in Ellen Cantarow, “No Kids,” The Village Voice (1985)

• Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much. Tom Stoppard, the character Gale speaking, in Where Are They Now? (1968); reprinted in Albert’s Bridge and Other Plays (1977)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly put a the before the Last Chance Gulch phrase (I made the same mistake in my 2008 book I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like).

• Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. Rabindranath Tagore, in Stray Birds (1916)

• The eyes of childhood are magnifying lenses. Edward Teller, in Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey in Science and Politics (2001; with Judith Shoolery)

• I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and advise them to do it. Harry S Truman, in television interview with Edward R. Murrow, CBS News (May 27, 1953)

• I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive. Anne Tyler, quoted in Janet Sternburg, The Writer on Her Work, Vol. 1 (1980)

• Children are so afraid of us because they know we may try to keep them from making their biggest and most important mistakes. Brenda Ueland, in Me: A Memoir (1939)

• Childhood comes at a time in your life when you are too young to understand what you are going through. And you're too young to understand that you are too young to understand. Jane Wagner, in My Life, So Far: by Edith Ann (1994)

• Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them. Oscar Wilde, the voice of the narrator, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

QUOTE NOTE: In his 1893 play A Woman of No importance (1893), Wilde reprised the sentiment in a sharper way by having the character Lord Illingworth say to Rachel Arbuthnot, “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”

• Children are an enlarging, if sobering, experience, and often amusing. But childhood is frequently a solemn business for those inside it. George F. Will, in his regular Newsweek column (Dec. 1978); reprinted in The Pursuit of Virtue & Other Tory Notions (1982)

• The child is father of the man. William Wordsworth, in “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” (written 1802, published 1807)

(see also PARENTS & CHILDREN)

(includes COCOA; see also CANDY and CONFECTIONS & CONFECTIONERIES and JELLYBEANS and SWEETS)

• Hot chocolate is like a hug from the inside. Author Unknown

• A chocolate in the mouth is worth two on the plate. Author Unknown, playing off the familiar proverb

• All you really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn’t hurt. Author Unknown

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this quotation is mistakenly attributed to Charles Schulz, with many saying it came from the character Lucy in a Peanuts cartoon. The saying first appeared on a Peanuts-themed Hallmark greeting card in the 1980s, but it was authored by an anonymous Hallmark designer, not Mr. Schulz.

• More than any other food, chocolate delights and enchants, evoking the memories and emotions that nourish our immeasurable passion for it. Neva Beach, the opening sentence of The Ghirardellli Chocolate Cookbook (1995)

Beach continued with this masterful metaphorical tribute: “Aficionados know that there is no such thing as too much chocolate. Some savor their chocolate in solitude, lingering over each bite; others flock to chocolate tastings in blissfull submission to their cherished obsession. Chocolate promises and chocolate fulfills. Chocolate tantalizes, and it comforts. Chocolate has soothed fretful children and welcomed tired travelers; mountain climbers have saved their last piece of chocolate to celebrate new heights, suitors have given chocolate to show the depth of their devotion. Chocolate has been used a stimulant, an aphrodisiac, and a form of currency.”

• Chocolate is both an industry and a sensation. And a delight. Herman A. Berliner, in the Foreword to Chocolate: Food of the Gods (1997; Alex Szogyi, ed.)

QUOTE NOTE: Berliner, a professor at Hofstra University, had hosted a scholarly conference titled, “Chocolate: Food of the Gods,” perhaps history’s first academic conference devoted to the subject. He preceded the foregoing thought by writing: “One can love chocolate, and one can study chocolate. I do both. As an economist, I study the economic and business impact of chocolate—and it is significant. But so is its psychological impact and its impact on health.”

• Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs at one go. Truman Capote, quoted in The Observer (London; Nov. 26, 1961)

• Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you’re going to get. Sally Field, in the role of Mrs. Gump, speaking to her son (played by Tom Hanks) in the film Forrest Gump (1994; screenplay by Eric Roth)

QUOTE NOTE: When Forrest repeats the line later in the film, he changes it from a metaphor to a simile, saying “My momma always said, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”

• I advise nobody to drown sorrow in cocoa. It is bad for the figure and it does not alleviate the sorrow. Winifred Holtby, “The Right Side of Thirty,” in Pavements at Anderby (1937)

• The superiority of chocolate, both for health and nourishment, will soon give it the same preference over tea and coffee in America, which it has in Spain. Thomas Jefferson, in letter to John Adams (Nov. 27, 1785); reprinted in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1954; J. P. Boyd, ed.)

• Dark is to milk chocolate what Dom Pérignon is to Dr. Pepper. Jennifer Harvey Lang, quoted in Anjula Razdan, “Hot Cocoa,” Utne Reader (Jan.-Feb., 2006)

• The ancient Mayans referred to chocolate as the food of the gods. Over time, it has changed from being a luxury that only the aristocracy could afford to the universal food that it is today. Christelle Le Ru, in Foreword to Passion Chocolat (2007)

Le Ru went on to add: “Most people enjoy chocolate, and some even go so far as calling themselves, ‘chocoholics’, i.e., chocolate addicts, who like me go to great lengths to make sure they never run out of stock. Reminiscent of childhood memories, luxury, sweetness and sensuality, chocolate is more than just food—it is therapy.”

• Chocolate is no ordinary food. It is not something you can take or leave, something you like only moderately. You don’t like chocolate. You don’t even love chocolate. Chocolate is something you have an affair with. Geneen Roth, in Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Compulsive Eating (1982)

• My tongue is smiling. Calvin Trillin, quoting his four-year-old daughter Abigail after she finished a dish of chocolate ice cream, in Alice, Let’s Eat (1978)

• Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces with your bare hands—and then eat just one of the pieces. Judith Viorst, quoted in Dorothy Uris, Say It Again (1979)

• The taste of chocolate is a sensual pleasure in itself, existing in the same world as sex. Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer, in a 1998 issue of Verve magazine (specific issue undetermined)

Dr. Ruth went on to add: “For myself, I can enjoy the wicked pleasure of chocolate…entirely by myself. Furtiveness makes it better.”

(includes CHOOSING; see also ALTERNATIVES and DECISIONS and DECISION-MAKING and FREEDOM and LIBERTY and OPTIONS and POSSIBILITY and PREFERENCES and WILL and [Free] WILL)

• Choice is a signature of our species. Diane Ackerman, in A Slender Thread: Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis (1997)

• When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice. Author Unknown, although widely attributed to William James

• You choose, you live the consequences. Every yes, no, maybe, creates the school you call your personal experience. Richard Bach, in Running From Safety (1994)

• Chance is better than choice; it is more lordly. Chance is God, choice is man. Elizabeth Bowen, in the Foreword to Pictures and Conversations (1975)

• When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man, Anthony Burgess, the chaplain speaking, in A Clockwork Orange (1962)

• You are the sum total of your choices. Wayne W. Dyer, in Your Erroneous Zones (1976)

• With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose. Wayne W. Dyer, a Facebook post (April 29, 2015)

• I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice. George Eliot, the character Mordecai speaking, in Daniel Deronda (1876)

• Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search For Meaning (1946)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented on internet sites and in quotation anthologies, but it originally appeared in this larger passage: “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

• “It’s when we're given choice that we sit with the gods and design ourselves; this was the moment to learn who I was and what I’d become. Dorothy Gilman, a reflection of narrator and protagonist Caressa Horvath, in Caravan: A Novel (1992)

• Don’t be obsessed with the idea that there is only one possibility. If you think so, there is only one. Katharine Butler Hathaway, in The Journals and Letters of the Little Locksmith (1946)

• We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause. William James, in letter to E.L. Godkin (Dec. 24 1895)

• It is the ability to choose which makes us human. Madeleine L’Engle, in Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (1980)

• In literature, as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others. André Maurois, quoted in “Reading Matter: Some Bookish Quotes,” in The New York Times (April 14, 1963)

• At twenty your choices are almost unlimited. At fifty you're a prisoner of past decisions. At seventy you have no free will left at all. Helen McCloy, the character Alcott speaking, in Mr. Splitfoot (1968)

• It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. J. K. Rowling, the character Dumbledore speaking, in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998)

• The basic division of peoples is of those who believe in choice and those who mistrust it. Nayantara Sahgal, in From Fear Set Free (1962)

Sahgal preceded the thought by writing: “Choice in any sphere is a peril.”

• Choices are not preferences. Choices are serious and often have significant repercussions. Alexandra Stoddard, in Making Choices: The Joy of a Courageous Life (1994)

Stoddard preceded the thought by writing: “Many people tell me they make big decisions all the time, but to make real choices is never painless. Whether to have fish or chicken for dinner is not a choice. I select one or the other based on my mood or the availability of fresh fish or whom I’m with.” Stoddard’s book also contained these other reflections on the subject:

“Our choices tell our story.”

“Realism, never perfection, is the key to wise choice-making.”

“There is never a perfect choice but there are wise and wonderful and sensible choices.”

• Of two evils, I always choose the lesser. Gene Stratton-Porter, quoted in Jeannette Porter Meehan, The Lady of the Limberlost: Life and Letters of Gene Stratton-Porter (1928)

• When conflicted between two choices, take neither. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

• Choice is the essence of what I believe it is to be human. Liv Ullmann, in Choices (1984)

• I think of all the choices I never knew. And those I let be made for me—to please, from fear, for love. Where did they disappear to, those choices that I never made? They are all part of who I am. They are the legacy I leave behind, they are the finished portrait of myself I cannot change. Liv Ullmann, in Choices (1984)

• Do lifelong artists pay a price for having chosen to make art? Of course. Everyone pays the price for his or her choices. Sally Warner, quoted in Eric Maisel, Fearless Creating (1995)

• One of the indispensable foods of the human soul is liberty. Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose. Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots (1949)

• You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood—and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life. Jessamyn West, in The Life I Really Lived (1979)

• Choose well: your choice is brief and yet endless. Ella Winter, in And Not to Yield: An Autobiography (1963)

• I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Jeanette Winterson, a reflection of the narrator and protagonist, a teenager named Jeanette, in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)

(see also EASTER and HOLIDAYS and INDEPENDENCE DAY and LABOR DAY and NEW YEAR’S DAY and SANTA CLAUS and THANKSGIVING DAY)

• I have often thought…it happens very well that Christmas should fall in the Middle of winter. Joseph Addison, quoting an English gentleman called Sir Roger, in The Spectator (London, Jan. 1712)

Addison continued: “It is the most dead uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer to support them.”

• “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. Louisa May Alcott, in Little Women (1868-69)

• Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with melody that would last forever. [ellipsis in original] Bess Streeter Aldrich, the voice of the narrator, in Song of Years (1939)

The narrator continued: “Even though you grew up and found you could never quite bring back the magic feeling of this night, the melody would stay in your heart always—a song for all the years.”

• Christmas: It’s the only religious holiday that’s also a federal holiday. That way, Christians can go to their services, and everyone else can sit at home and reflect on the true meaning of the separation of church and state. Samantha Bee, in a 2008 issue of Reader’s Digest (specific issue undetermined)

• Christmas itself may be called into question,/If carried so far it creates indigestion. Ralph Bergengren, “The Unwise Christmas,” in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (Dec. 1913)