Table of Contents

“P” Quotations

PACIFISM & PACIFISTS

(see also NON-VIOLENCE and PEACE and VIOLENCE and WAR & PEACE)

Einstein preceded the thought by writing: “As long as armies exist, any serious conflict will lead to war.”

PAIN

(see also AGONY and ANGUISH and DEPRESSION and DIFFICULTY and GRIEF & GRIEVING and ILLNESS and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and PLEASURE and PLEASURE & PAIN and PROBLEMS and SORROW and SUFFERING and TEARS and TORMENT and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS)

In his short poem, one of his most popular pieces of verse, Bryant continued: “The fiercest agonies have shortest reign;/And after dreams of horror, comes again/The welcome morning with its rays of peace.”

This was the concluding line to a passage in which Charles described how music had eased the deep pain in his life, but didn’t make it go away. He wrote: “I release feelings inside me through my songs. I take some of the sadness, some of the heartache, and turn it out. I’m able to stave off the severity. By expressing myself in music, I can soften the blow. But those melodies and rhythms can only do so much.”

QUOTE NOTE: Daudet (1840–97), a popular nineteenth-century French novelist, suffered for most of his adult life from syphilis, an incurable disease at the time, and one rarely discussed or even mentioned in public. In the final dozen years of his life—a life filled with excruciatating pain—he recorded his thoughts and experiences in a detailed notebook (published more than three decades later by his widow).

Brother William, talking with Umbertino about torture, continued: “Under torture you are as if under the dominion of those grasses that produce visions. Everything you have heard told, everything you have read returns to your mind, as if you were being transported, not toward heaven, but toward hell. Under torture you say not only what the inquisitor wants, but also what you imagine might please him, because a bond…is established between you and him.”

Eliot continued: “There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.”

The narrator continued: “Without fear, there could be no humility, and every man would be a monster. The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.”

In making her well-known distinction between pain and suffering, Lorde continued: “Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it, self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: I first discovered this remarkable observation in De Angelis’s 2005 book and have since seen it in hundreds of anthologies, self-help books, and blogs—but never with a citation. After a fairly extensive search, I have not identified an original source.

QUOTE NOTE: To see the larger metaphorical passage in which this aphorism originally appeared, go to the Pavese entry in the LIFE section.

ERROR ALERT: Numerous internet sites mistakenly identify the source as Pessoa’s classic The Book of Disquiet. To see the entire letter, written when Pessoa was “at the bottom of a bottomless depression,” see Pessoa 1916 Letter.

QUOTE NOTE: This was Schweitzer’s expression for the powerful bond connecting people who have experienced great pain. He wrote: “Who are the members of this Fellowship? Those who have learnt by experience what physical pain and bodily anguish mean, belong together all the world over; they are united by a secret bond. One and all they know the horrors of suffering to which man can be exposed, and one and all they know the longing to be free from pain.”

Taylor, the longtime editor of Essence magazine, added: “In some way, all in life is instructive and good. All our experiences are meant to help us grow in wisdom, faith, and courage, and they are always right on time.”

PAINTERS

(see also ART and ARTISTS and PAINTING and PORTRAITS and SCULPTURE & SCULPTORS)

QUOTATION CAUTION: One of the most famous Picasso quotations, this one has been making the rounds since just after WWII (the earliest appearance I’ve seen was a 1945 article in The Norseman, a Norwegian literary and political review). I have never seen an original source cited, though, and have been unable to locate one. Note that the observation is also an example of chiasmus.

QUOTE NOTE: The line appears in a larger passage about the fleeting nature of man’s deepest pursuits: “Everything that man esteems/Endures a moment or a day./Love’s pleasure drives his love away,/The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.”

PAINTING

(see also ART and ARTISTS and PAINTERS and PORTRAITS and SCULPTURE & SCULPTORS)

Wallace, who co-founded Reader’s Digest with husband Dewitt in 1922, had a multimillion dollar art collection. She told an interviewer that she never purchased art as an investment or with an eye toward future value, but only when she “fell in love” with a piece.

Bashkirtseff added: “The true artist should conceive as a man of genius, and execute as a poet.”

Mull’s observation came in response to interviewer David Rensin’s question, “What can we learn from looking at paintings?” Mull began his answer by saying: “After leaving an exhibition, I’ll find that my perception of the outside world has been changed. Instantly. My experience has been altered by the artists’s vision, and I will see things that I haven’t seen before.” The entire interview may be found at: Mull Playboy Interview.

PAINTERS—ON THEMSELVES

(see ARTISTS—ON THEMSELVES)

PAINTERS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS

(see ARTISTS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS)

PARABLES

(see MYTHS and STORIES & STORYTELLING and TALES)

Hoffman went on to add: “It must be the reflection of the artist who creates it and of the era in which he lives, not an echo or a memory of other days and other ways.”

Le Guin continued: “For the story—from ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ to ‘War and Peace’—is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”

PARENTS & PARENTHOOD

(see also CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and FATHERS and FATHERS & DAUGHTERS and FATHERS & SONS and GRANDPARENTS and MOTHERS and MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS and MOTHERS & SONS and PARENTS & CHILDREN)

De Beauvoir continued: “You can’t assume the responsibility for everything you do—or don’t do.”

Frost introduced the thought by saying: “You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular. One’s a Republican, one’s a Democrat.”

Keillor preceded the thought by writing: “Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child rearing. You don’t put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you.”

Macaulay added: “Charming to be with for a time, in the main they must lead their own lives, independent and self-employed with companions of their own age and selection.

QUOTE NOTE: The tangled web expression first appeared in a couplet from Sir Walter Scott, to be found in Deception & Deceit.

Reik added: “There is no call coming from those living as insistent, permanent and penetrating as the silent voice of our parents from the country of the dead.”

PARENTS & CHILDREN

(see also CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and FATHERS and FATHERS & DAUGHTERS and FATHERS & SONS and GRANDPARENTS and MOTHERS and MOTHERS & DAUGHTERS and MOTHERS & SONS and PARENTS & PARENTHOOD)

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)

QUOTE NOTE: This passage has also been translated this way: “It is not a bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their place.

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.

QUOTE NOTE: Wilde reprised the sentiment in his 1893 play A Woman of No importance (1893), with the word “sometimes” replacing “rarely, if ever.”

PANIC

(see also ALARM and DANGER and DREAD and FEAR and HORROR and HYSTERIA and TERROR)

In her book, Beattie also wrote: “Panic, not the task, is the enemy.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation came in a discussion of real versus imagined dangers. Bovee introduced the thought by writing, “A visible danger rouses our energies to meet or avert it; a fancied peril appalls from its presenting nothing to be resisted.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly present the first portion of the observation above as if it read, “A panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination.”

PARADOX

(see also CONTRADICTION and CONTRAST and IDEAS and IRONY and OPPOSITES and OXYMORON and THINKING & THINKERS and THOUGHT and [Examples of] PARADOX)

QUOTE NOTE: For many years, it was believed that some anonymous person was the author of the popular saying that a paradox is truth standing on its head to get [or attract] our attention. It now appears that Chesterton—through the narrator of his short story—may have been the first to use this memorable phrasing. Chesterton is not, however, the original author of the sentiment. That honor goes to Richard Le Gallienne, who first offered the thought in connection with Oscar Wilde. See the Le Gallienne entry below.

QUOTE NOTE: Kierkegaard originally published the work under the pen name Johannes Climacus. When the work first began to appear in English translations in the 1920s, one publisher titled it Philosophical Trifles and another Philosophical Chips.

QUOTE NOTE: According to quotation expert Nigel Rees, this is the original thought that eventually morphed into the popular saying, “Paradox is truth standing on its head to get our attention.” See the Chesterton entry above for more.

QUOTE NOTE: Sandburg was twenty-four years old when Incidentals, a book of prose and poetry, first came out. In Gay Wilson Allen’s biography Carl Sandburg (1972), he wrote of this and a few other Sandburg thoughts: “These juvenilia Sandburg was glad to forget, and they have never been reprinted, except for brief quotations in Harry Golden’s Carl Sandburg and in an article I wrote for an academic magazine.” While Incidentals does contain a number of what might be regarded as juvenile creations, I do not regard Sandburg’s paradox observation as one of them.

PARIS

(see also BOSTON and CHICAGO and CITIES—AMERICAN and CITIES—AROUND THE WORLD and LAS VEGAS and LONDON and LOS ANGELES/HOLLYWOOD and NEW ORLEANS and NEW YORK CITY and SAN FRANCISCO and WASHINGTON, DC)

Du Maurier continued: “You’ve got to work, to keep up with the pace, the sting in the atmosphere.”

The reflection continued: “The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.”

Fabrice continued: “But it is always a source of joy to live here, and there is nobody so miserable as a Parisian in exile from his town. The rest of the world seems unbearably cold and bleak to us, hardly worth living in.”

PARODY

(see also BURLESQUE and CARICATURE and CRITICISM and LAMPOON and RIDICULE and SATIRE)

Gill was writing specifically about Wolcott Gibbs, but his remarks were clearly intended to describe parodists in general. He went on to write: “Parody is homage gone sour; it is an accommodation to one’s own failings in the very act of pointing out the failings of others. For a writer, it amounts to a kind of gallows humor, in which the executioner is seen to be envious of his victim.”

PARTS OF SPEECH

(includes ADJECTIVES, ADVERBS, NOUNS, and VERBS; see also GRAMMAR and LANGUAGE USAGE and SPELLING and PUNCTUATION)

A moment earlier, Hanratty preceded the thought by thinking: “People reveal how ordinary their minds are by the metaphors they use.”

Chekhov continued with this piece of feedback to his friend: “You use so many of them that the reader finds it hard to concentrate and he gets tired.” For the full letter, go to Chekhov Letter to Gorky.

Yet another example of chiasmus.

Gilchrist continued about adjectives: “They have less strength of meaning, since they stand for just one aspect of a thing, one characteristic, and do not represent it in its entirety.” The American poet (and concert violinist) Leonora Speyer featured Gilchrist’s observation in a 1946 Saturday Review of Literature article, adding that adverbs are also a cheaper ore. But Speyer came to the defense of the oft-maligned adjective, writing: “But the adjective can be pure metal too.” As examples, she cited “man’s own resinous heart” (Yeats) and “mild and magnificent eye” (Wordsworth).

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation usually appears, but it was originally part of a larger observation. Discussing books by Evelyn Waugh, Greene wrote: “Pinfold, I think, shows him technically at his most perfect. How well he faces the problem of linking passages between the scenes. There is almost a complete absence of the beastly adverb—far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.”

QUOTE NOTE: For more than a century, “The adjective is the enemy of the noun” has been attributed to Voltaire, and numerous books on writing continue that pattern. The quotation has never been found in his writings, though, and the actual author remains unknown. Here, Guthrie is simply making reference to the saying, and adding to it.

King continued with a metaphorical masterpiece:

To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day…fifty the day after that…and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.

Miller ended his metaphorical flight of fancy in, for him, a predictable way: “Wow! Think I got my ass kicked much in high school?”

QUOTE NOTE: The article, in which Twain was replying to a letter from “A Boston Girl” about his improper use of adverbs, originally appeared as an anonymously-authored piece in a section of the magazine called “Contributors’ Club.” Some years later, it was discovered that Twain was the author. Twain went on to write: “There are subtleties which I cannot master at all—they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me—and this adverb plague is one of them.” To see the entire piece, go to Reply to a Boston Girl.

Twain began his letter to twelve-year-old Wattie Bowser by writing: “I notice you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English—it is the modern way, and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable. They give strength when they are wide apart.”

Walker, the city editor at the New York Herald Tribune, was one of the best known “newspaper men” of his time. He continued: “Because one adjective is as revealing as a lightning flash, don’t think that ten will make the story ten times as good. There is a law of diminishing returns.”

Zinsser added: “Not every oak has to be gnarled, every detective hard-bitten. The adjective that exists solely as a decoration is a self-indulgence for the writer and an obstacle for the reader.”

Zinsser continued: “Good criticism needs a lean and vivid style to express what you observed and what you think. Florid adjectives smack of the panting prose with which Vogue likes to disclose its latest chichi discovery: ‘We’ve just heard about the most utterly enchanting little beach at Cozumel.’”

PARTS OF SPEECH METAPHORS

(see also metaphors derived from the following topics: ANIMALS and BASEBALL and BIRDS and BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING and CANCER and DARKNESS and DISEASE and FOOTBALL and FRUIT and GARDENING and HEART and JOURNEYS and NAUTICAL and PATH and PLANTS and PUNCTUATION and RETAIL/WHOLESALE and ROAD and VEGETABLES)

De Angelis continued: “Marriage is a behavior. It is a choice you make over and over again, reflected in the way you treat your partner every day.”

PASSION

(see also DESIRE and ECSTASY and EMOTION and FEELINGS and LOVE and LUST and PASSION & REASON and REASON and SEX)

Beecher continued: “Thus they become, as in the ancient fable, the harnessed steeds which bear the chariot of the sun.”

Dawkins continued: “It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.”

Richard Dawkins (2017). “Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist”,

QUOTE NOTE: In an 1749 issue of Poor Richard’s Almanack, Benjamin Franklin presented a slightly altered version of Fuller’s observation: “A man in a passion rides a mad horse.”

Hagberg continued: “Passion comes when we connect with the things, people, causes, or issues that touch us at our deepest place.”

In her book, Hagburg also offered these two other observations on the subject:

“Passion is the engagement of our soul with something beyond us, something that helps us put up with or fight against insurmountable odds, even at high risks, because it is all worth it.”

“Once we have found our passion, we feel a strange contradiction: On one hand, we could die today and life would have been worth it, and at the same time, we want to live forever to continue our connection to our passion.”

QUOTE NOTE: The passage comes near the end of the book, with the narrator adding: “Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly present the observation in the following way: “Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.”

A moment later, Jobs went on to add: “Unless you have a lot of passion…you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

An example of chiasmus.

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.”

Lennon continued: “We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hope for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”

Richter added about passion: “It is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter as it is narrower.”

In Rebecca Maddox’s Inc. Your Dreams (1995), she quoted Roddick as saying: “If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.”

Russell added: “Opinions in politics and religion are almost always held passionately.”

QUOTE NOTE: Sand was twenty-six, and at the very beginning of her career, when she wrote this letter. She had published a brief autobiographical sketch (Voyage en Auvergne in 1827, and her first novel (Rose et Blanche), written with Jules Sandeau), would appear later in 1831. She preceded the thought above by writing that, despite the difficulties associated with a writing career, “I feel that henceforth my existence has an aim.”

O, that my tongue were in the thunder's mouth! Then with a passion would I shake the world. William Shakespeare, King John (1598), Act III, scene 4, line 38.

Give me that man That is not passion's slave. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1600-02), Act III, scene 2, line 75.

Shenstone continued: “Subduing our passions is disengaging ourselves from the world; to which however, whilst we reside in it, we must always bear relation; and we may detach ourselves to such a degree as to pass an useless and insipid life, which we were not meant to do.”

Stoddard went on to add: “We gain energy from being free to do those things we chose to do. We never tire when we are working on our projects. Energy is emotional to a large degree.”

Lady Jane continued: “The ambition of such is not the vulgar passion for the possession of an object, be it a fortune or a crown, but a passionate desire for the power which accompanies such possession, enabling the hand to execute what the soul conceives.”

PASSION & REASON

(see also DESIRE and EMOTION and FEELINGS and LOVE and LUST and REASON and SEX)

PAST

(see also FUTURE and HISTORY and MEMORY and NOSTALGIA and PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE and REMEMBRANCE and TIME and TRADITION)

Bachelard continued: “To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort.”

Baldwin added: “An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressure of life like clay in a season of drought.”

Barrie added: “If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.”

Cioran added: “Life would be bearable only to frivolous natures, those in fact who do not remember.”

ERROR ALERT: For many years, and even up to the present day, this line has been mistakenly presented: “The past is not dead; it’s not even past.” The quotation waters got further muddied in 2008 when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama recast the observation in his famous “A More Perfect Union Speech” (March 18, 2008), saying, “As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’” For a fascinating Harper’s blog post, written a week after the Obama speech, go to The Past is Not Past. Or Is It?

Gardner continued: “Sometimes people cling to the ghosts with something almost approaching pleasure—but the hampering effect in growth is inescapable.”

QUOTE NOTE: Some opening lines go on to enjoy a life of their own as quotations, and this one has long held an honored place in The Big Three quotation anthologies: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, The Oxford Book of Quotations, and the Yale Book of Quotations (in each one, it is Hartley’s only entry). Many quotation lovers—including me—consider it one of the very best things ever written about the subject of the past.

Hartley’s elegant observation is also regarded as one of the best opening lines in literary history. The American Book Review ranked it Number 78 on its classic list of “The 100 Best First Lines from Novels,” and writer Colin Falconer ranked it Number 20 on his 2013 list of “The Best 43 Opening Lines in Novel Writing History.” About it, Falconer wrote: “Wonderful metaphor, and so many questions arise from this simple sentence. You just have to know what he means and why the past is important to him.”

James went on to add, “The past is not static. It can be relived only in memory, and memory is a device for forgetting as well as remembering. It, too, is not immutable. It rediscovers, reinvents, reorganizes. Like a passage of prose it can be revised and repunctuated. To that extent, every autobiography is a work of fiction and every work of fiction an autobiography.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is a spectacular metaphorical observation—and a fabulous opening line—from a female writer who was well known and widely praised in her era (she was so familiar to English readers that publishers selected her to write the Introduction to the 1952 British edition of The Diary of Anne Frank). Sadly, Jameson has been largely forgotten by modern readers.

Jameson’s opening line is similar to L. P. Hartley’s even more famous metaphorical opening line, seen above. Even though I have no evidence to support my contention, I’ve always suspected that Hartley might have been inspired by Jameson’s opening line which appeared a few decades earlier.

QUOTATION CAUTION: This looks like the earliest appearance of this observation, which has become very popular despite its lack of authentication. I’m not ready to declare it apocryphal, but I’m close.

Ozick continued: “In any case it flickers in and out of our lives. We never escape from it and we all inherit it.” The remark came in a discussion of the title of her 2004 book Heir to the Glimmering World. See the full interview at 2004 Ozick Interview.

Sandburg continued: “I tell you there is nothing in the world/only an ocean of tomorrows,/a sky of tomorrows.”

QUOTE NOTE: This may be history’s most famous saying on the importance of learning from past experience. The essential proposition makes a lot of sense, of course, but throughout history individuals as well as nations have failed to heed the lesson. The problem has been described in a multitude of ways by a multitude of writers over the ages. In his 1987 novel Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut has a character say: “I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”

ERROR ALERT: Numerous quotation collections mistakenly attribute this quotation to Cyril Connolly.

PAST, PRESENT, & FUTURE

(see also FUTURE and HISTORY and MEMORY and NOSTALGIA and PAST and PRESENT and REMEMBRANCE and TIME and TRADITION)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation has been traditionally translated, but today one is more likely to see it presented in the following way on internet sites: “When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”

QUOTE NOTE: Durant reprised the observation in a prefatory note “To the Reader,” in The Story of Civilization: The Reformation (Vol. VI; 1957)The observation is also a perfect example of the literary device known as chiasmus.

QUOTE NOTE: The observation comes from the daughter of Mrs. Lou Witt, the novella’s protagonist, in a letter written to her mother.

Ulrich introduced the thought by writing: “Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus. But they also make history by keeping diaries, writing letters, or embroidering initials on linen sheets.”

PATH METAPHORS

(see also metaphors involving ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BATHING & BATHS, BIRDS, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CANCER, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, GARDENING, HEART, JOURNEYS, LADDERS, LIGHT & LIGHTNESS, MOTHERS, PARTS OF SPEECH, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, ROAD, NAUTICAL, POISON, SUN & MOONS, VEGETABLES, and WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

AUTHOR NOTE: Blavatsky was a founder of The Theosophical Society, which propounded a variant of Theravada Buddhism. She added: “The more one dares, the more he shall obtain. The more he fears, the more that light shall pale.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this quotation is attributed to Burroughs, but it has not been found in his works. It appears to be a paraphrasing of the following thought from Signs and Seasons (1886): “The place to observe nature is where you are: the walk you take to-day is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things.”

AUTHOR NOTE: La Fontaine, a popular seventeenth-century French poet, is best remembered for his Fables, published in a dozen volumes from 1668 to 1694. In the tradition of Aesop and the Indian fabulists who authored The Panchatantra, he offered moral lessons in short stories—many involving animals—that were simple enough for children to understand. About his efforts, Madame de Sévigné, the French wit and woman of letters, wrote: “La Fontaine’s Fables are like a basket of strawberries. You begin by selecting the largest and best, but, little by little, you eat first one, then another, till at last the basket is empty.”

QUOTE NOTE: Lincoln added: “It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it.” For more on the speech, which was instrumental in establishing Lincoln’s skills as an orator, go to Lyceum Address.

In the speech, titled “Toward the Splendid City,” Neruda added: “And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence, in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.”

Just prior to this passage, Thoreau wrote that a magazine article about Australian gold miners got him to do some serious soul-searching: “I was thinking of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do without any fixed star habitually in my eye, my foot not planted in any blessed isle. Then, with that vision of the diggings before me, I asked myself why I might not…sink a shaft down to the gold within me and work that mine.”

ERROR ALERT: Most versions of the quote on the web mistakenly begin the couplet, “The world’s a forest.”

PATÉ

(see also COOKS & COOKING and DESCRIPTIONS—OF FOODS & PREPARED DISHES and DINNERS & DINING and GOURMETS & GOURMANDS and MEALS and MEAT)

PATIENCE

(see also IMPATIENCE and PERSISTENCE & PERSEVERANCE)

QUOTE NOTE: This powerful epigrammatic thought was the conclusion to a larger, and equally impressive, passage on the subject: “What is patience? It is the experience of the sensitive man whose sensitiveness is mastered by a dominating love, and therefore endures; who is roiled and tried, and still maintains an equable temper. No man can be patient who has not strong passions, for patience is passion tamed.”

Baum added: “People who have, or believe they have talent but no patience are and remain dilettantes.”

QUOTE NOTE: This line was followed by Browning’s more famous words: “I did some excellent things indifferently,/Some bad things excellently. Both were praised,/The latter loudest.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented as if it were phrased in the following way: “The two hardest tests on the spiritual road are the patience to wait for the right moment and the courage not to be disappointed with what we encounter.”

Da Vinci added: “For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.”

QUOTE NOTE: De Sales was writing to a female friend who was going through a difficult time. A bit earlier in the letter, he wrote: “You greatly need patience; and I hope God will grant it to you if you diligently ask it of Him, and strive to cultivate it faithfully. Make special application of some point in your daily meditation to this subject, and then be persistent in summoning up your patience all through the day, as often as you feel that it is wavering. Never let slip on any occasion, however trifling, of practicing the grace of gentleness toward those around [you].”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the version of the sentiment most often remembered by history, but Dryden was almost certainly inspired by an observation from the Roman writer Publilius Syrus, who wrote in Sententiae (1st. cent. B.C.): “Patience provoked often turns to fury.” It is likely that Michel de Montaigne was also inspired by the Syrus observation when he wrote in a 1581 essay (“Upon Some Verses of Virgil”): “Extreme patience or long-sufferance, if it once come to be dissolved, produceth most bitter and outrageous revenges.”

QUOTE NOTE: Leclerc, the great French naturalist who is better known by his title (Count de Buffon), is also commonly cited as the author of an even more famous observation about patience: “Never think that God’s delays are God’s denials. Hold on; hold fast, hold out. Patience is genius.” These words are often cited in literary and scientific works as Buffon’s Maxim, but the passage has never been found in Buffon’s writings.

Lokos added: “If we spend time with our experience—the thoughts, feelings, and sensations that arise—we can gain insight. Wisdom arises as we see things with greater clarity.”

QUOTE NOTE: Morton was almost certainly inspired by something Edmund Burke had written three decades earlier in the 1769 pamphlet Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation: “There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.” Forbearance, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “Tolerance and restraint in the face of provocation,” is often seen as a synonym of patience.

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often presented as “move mountains/”

QUOTE NOTE: The word compass here means “to understand; comprehend.”

QUOTE NOTE: The saying is commonly attributed to Rousseau, but he was passing along a maxim that had already achieved proverbial status.

PATIENTS

(see also DOCTORS and DOCTORS & PATIENTS and HOSPITALS and ILLNESS and MEDICINE and NURSES & NURSING and PAIN)

In the book, Nightingale also offered these additional observations on patients:

“Never to allow a patient to be waked, intentionally or accidentally, is a sine qua non of all good nursing.”

“Nature alone cures…what nursing has to do…is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him.”

PATRIOTISM & PATRIOTS

(see also NATIONALISM and PATRIOTISM & NATIONALISM)

ERROR ALERT: A similar observation (“It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government”) is commonly attributed to Thomas Paine, but there is no evidence he every wrote such a thing.

Adams continued: “There may be more danger of this than some even of our well disposed citizens may imagine.”

QUOTE NOTE: See how Bierce finished his definition of patriotism after the Samuel Johnson entry below.

According to Kahn, Casals continued: “There is a brotherhood among all men. This must be recognized if life is to remain. We must learn the love of man.”

QUOTE NOTE: For an earlier patriotism as religion metaphor, see the de Tocqueville observation below.

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has also been translated this way: “For in the United States it is believed, and with truth, that patriotism is a kind of devotion which is strengthened by ritual observance.”

QUOTE NOTE: The quotation was originally written in Dunne's signature dialect style: “It looks to me,” he went on in a melancholy tone, “as if they was too much noise an’ smoke about pathritism in America f’r the good ib th’ country.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation came as Einstein, one of history’s great pacifists, was discussing his abhorrence for war. He famously continued: “War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business.”

Inge preceded the thought by writing: “But, though pugnacity and acquisitiveness have been the real foundation of much miscalled patriotism, better motives are generally mingled with these primitive instincts.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is one of quotation history’s most celebrated observations, and the inspiration for numerous spin-offs. In the “patriotism” entry of The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), Ambrose Bierce wrote: “In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.” For a number of observations inspired by Dr. Johnson’s legendary quotation, see REFUGE METAPHORS

You might also be interested in Boswell’s full original entry: “Patriotism having become one of our topics, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone an apophthegm at which many will start: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak of self-interest.”

Priestley continued: “We should cast the same affectionate by sharp glance at our country. We should love it, but also insist upon telling it all its faults. The dangerous man is not the critic, but the noisy, empty ‘patriot’ who encourages us to result in orgies of self-congratulation.”

A bit later, Roosevelt added: “Outward behavior, while important, is not the real measure of a man’s patriotism. ”

Roy was talking about the dangers of nationalism, which she described as “the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century.” She continued: “When independent, thinking people…begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the nation, it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.”

Seaman preceded the thought by writing: “Dissent is essential to democracy, although those who practice it are often accused of being unpatriotic. The idea that patriotism demands passivity and obedience, a following of orders as though citizenship is a form of military service, or as if the state is a church and citizens are required to embrace an unexamined faith, or at least act as though they do, contradicts democratic principles and is out of sync with the structure of our government, which accommodates and even demands debate, and which consists of a system of checks and balances to ensure that power is never absolute.”

ERROR ALERT: The observation is often presented as if it were phrased: “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”

PATRIOTISM & NATIONALISM

(see also NATIONALISM and PATRIOTISM)

Orwell’s essay was written just as WWII was coming to an end, but his observations on nationalism and patriotism seem as relevant today as when they were originally written. Here are some other quotes from the essay:

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

“Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved….”

PATRON

(see also BACKER and BENEFACTOR and HELPERS & HELPING [Angel] INVESTOR and PHILANTHROPIST and SPONSOR)

QUOTE NOTE: While Lord Chesterfield was officially listed as a patron of Dr. Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language (first published in 1755), he offered very little assistance during the early years of the project. A few months before publication, however, he wrote two “puff” pieces endorsing the effort, From Johnson’s perspective, it was not simply a case of “too little, too late,” but an outright act of opportunism on Chesterfield’s part. Johnson preceded the thought above by writing: “Seven years, my lord, have now past since I waited in your outward rooms or was repulsed from your door, during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before.” Johnson's resentment toward Chesterfield even showed up in his dictionary's definition of patron: “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.”

PAUSES & PAUSING

(see also COMMUNICATION and CONVERSATION and LISTENING and SILENCE and SPEECH & SPEAKING and TALK & TALKING and WORDS)

PEACE

(see also AGGRESSION and CONFLICT and NONVIOLENCE and PACIFISM and [Disturbing the] PEACE and PEACE OF MIND and VIOLENCE and WAR and WAR & PEACE)

[Disturbing the] PEACE

(see also AGITATION & AGITATORS and CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE and CONFLICT and NONVIOLENCE and and PEACE and PROTEST and [Civil] UNREST)

PEACE OF MIND

(includes INNER PEACE; see also ACCEPTANCE and ANXIETY and [Inner] CONFLICT and CONTENTMENT and PEACE and TRANQUILITY and SERENITY and TURMOIL)

ERROR ALERT: Buber offered this thought just after he had quoted Rabbi Simha Bunam as saying, “Seek peace in your own place.” As a result, the observation is often mistakenly attributed to Bunam, even in such respected quotation anthologies as Joseph L. Baron’s A Treasury of Jewish Quotations (1956)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the first line of one of Christendom’s most famous prayers, sometimes called The Peace Prayer and frequently misattributed to St. Francis of Assisi. While there are a number of versions, the most popular goes this way:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

For more on the history of the prayer, see the Peace Prayer of St. Francis and this 2011 post by The Quote Investigator.

QUOTE NOTE: Sixteen years later, in the 1996 book Out of the Blue: Delight Comes Into Our Lives (co-authored with Barbara Nichols and Patty Hansen, the same quotation appears, but this time with the words “You deserve delight” appended.

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, and in a number of popular books on the subject of happiness, this observation is mistakenly attributed to the philosopher Hannah Arendt. For more, see Garson O’Toole’s Quote Investigator post here

A moment later, the narrator went on to explain: “We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself and we slip at last into place.”

QUOTE NOTE: Henry was talking about peace and reconciliation between warring religious factions. He continued: “Those who are hot and bitter in their contendings for or against little things, and zealous in keeping up names of division and maintaining parties, are of a spirit which I understand not.”

Maslow preceded the thought by writing: “We may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he, individually, is fitted for.”

Maxwell preceded the thought by writing: “There have been hundreds of times when I’ve experienced strained relatioships. I have had people swear at me, tell me where to go, how to get there, and offer their assistance. But I have never knowingly let them walk out the door without telling them I love them. I don’t hold any grudges or carry any resentment against anyone. I cannot stress this enough.”

Nhat Hanh continued: “If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace.”

Nhat Hanh continued: “If we really know how to live, what better way to start the day than with a smile? Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.”

Woolf continued: “Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag-ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult, nervous system.”

PEARLS

(see also DIAMONDS and GEMS and GOLD and JEWELS & JEWELRY and SILVER)

Fellini preceded the thought by writing, “All art is autobiographical.”

PEDESTALS

QUOTE NOTE: Almost all internet sites and quotation anthologies wrongly cite Gloria Steinem as the author of this saying. While Steinem has employed the saying many times—and is clearly the person most responsible for popularizing it—she credited an anonymous “southern black feminist” with authorship in an April 1977 speech in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The saying began to emerge in the early 1970s and, according to a 2017 Quote Investigator post, it first showed up in print in a 1974 advertisement for a realty company in a September 1974 issue of the Uma Daily Sun. The saying builds upon a number of earlier observations that questioned the value of putting people on pedestals (you’ll see them below).

Benson continued: “The cow in India finds her position equally lofty and tiresome. You practically never see a happy cow in India.”

Ehrenreich continued: “Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the ‘work ethic’ if it wasn’t for the fact that the average working stiff’s hourly pay is shrinking, year by year.”

QUOTE NOTE: Addams (1860-1935) was a pioneering American social activist and reformer, possibly best known for helping to found Hull House, a settlement house for the poor. Kendall preceded the observation by writing, “At that time men tended to place women of her cultivated tastes on a pedestal.”

Ken Levine and David Isaacs, dialogue from the television sitcom “Frazier,” (Feb. 21, 1995; episode 16 of season 2)

QUOTE NOTE: In the article, Midstokke was talking about the importance of compliments, praise, acknowledgments, and other affirmations of our personal worth. Later in the column, she wrote:

“Which brings me to the importance of the pedestal. I am told they are topple-tippy things, a precarious risk to be stood upon. Once placed up there, the only place we can go is down. I disagree. We should be put on pedestals all the time, preferably for the most mundane things. I know this because my husband has healed a thousands wounds of my inner child by doing just that. He literally told me he was proud of me for taking a nap the other day. This is brilliant because I’m really good at taking naps. What I’m learning is that it is often these nearly microscopic acknowledgements, the tiny affirmations of our choices, the nods of empathy when we wrestle with our mistakes, that give us our sense of place, belonging, worth.”

QUOTE NOTE: Along with an image of Newman's iconic face, almost every one of the 550-plus issues of Mad included a short humorous quotation credited to Neuman on the magazine's Table of Contents (most were likely written by editor Harvey Kurtzman).

PEDANTRY & PEDANTS

(see also AFFECTATION and AUTHENTICITY and KNOWLEDGE and POMPOSITY & POMPOUSNESS and PRETENSION & PRETENTIOUSNESS and SCHOLARS & SCHOLARSHIP and STUDY)

QUOTE NOTE: It’s possible that Ballou was summarizing a thought from Billings rather than quoting him directly. In Donald Day’s Uncle Sam’s Uncle Josh (1972), Billings is quoted as saying, “Pedantry is a little knowledge on parade.”

PENNSYLVANIA

(see UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—SPECIFIC STATES)

PENTAGON

(see also ARMY and BUREAUCRACY and DEFENSE and GENERALS and GOVERNMENT and MILITARY)

PERCEPTION

(includes PERCEIVING; see also EYES and INTUITION and REALITY and SENSES and SIGHT & SEEING and VISION)

QUOTE NOTE: These words so inspired Aldous Huxley that he chose The Doors of Perception as the title for his 1954 book on mind-expanding drugs. Less than a decade later, Huxley’s book, in turn, inspired UCLA poetry student and aspiring musician Jim Morrison to name his newly-formed rock group The Doors.

Rosten continued: “I said this before; let me expand on it. All of our perceptions are partial. crippled recognitions of the realities around us. We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear.”

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly attributed to Anaïs Nin.

PERFECTION & PERFECTIONISM

(see also ABILITY and GENIUS and EXCELLENCE and IMPERFECTION and MEDIOCRITY and STANDARDS and QUALITY and TASTE and TALENT)

QUOTE NOTE: A bit later in the same essay, Arnold wrote: “Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.”

Channing continued: “Possessing this, it matters little what or where we are now; for we can conquer a better lot, and even be happier for starting from the lowest point.”

QUOTE NOTE: Cohen wrote many memorable lyrics in his career, but few rival the power of this simple refrain about imperfection in human life. To see Cohen deliver a live performance of the song, go to Anthem.

QUOTE NOTE: I can’t be sure, but it’s possible that Lombardi was familiar with similar observations from Samuel Johnson (seen above) and Lord Chesterfield (see the Phillip Dormer Stanhope entry below).

ERROR ALERT: On almost all internet sites, this quotation is mistakenly presented in the following way: “A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.”

QUOTE NOTE: Lord Chesterfield returned to the theme two years later (Feb. 20, 1752) when he wrote to his son: “Those who aim at perfection will come infinitely nearer it than those desponding [sic], or indolent spirits, who foolishly say to themselves, Nobody is perfect; perfection is unattainable; to attempt it is chimerical.” Go here to see Chesterfield’s additional thoughts on the subject of aiming for perfection—thoughts which are still worth reading, even though originally written more than 250 years ago. Lord Chesterfield’s observation may have also served as an inspiration for Vince Lombardi’s famous observation on the subject, offered more than two centuries later (see the Lombardi entry above).

PERILS

(see also CALAMITY and CRISIS and DANGER and DIFFICULTY and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and OBSTACLES and PROBLEMS and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS and TROUBLE and SAFETY and STUMBLES & STUMBLING and STRUGGLE and SUFFERING & SORROW and TEST and TROUBLE)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the first appearance of the words through thick and thin, which went on to become a popular catchphrase.

PERJURY

(see also COURT OF LAW and DECEPTION & DECEIPT and DISHONESTY and LIES & LYING and TESTIMONY and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

PERMISSION

(includes PERMITS and PERMITTED; see also APPROVAL and AUTHORIZATION and FORGIVENESS)

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to be the earliest appearance of a sentiment that has evolved into a modern proverb.

PERSECUTION

(see also FANATICISM and HERESY & HERETICS and ORTHODOXY and PUNISHMENT and RELIGION and TOLERATION and TYRANNY)

QUOTE NOTE: The Mortal Storm holds the distinction of being the first novel to mention Adolf Hitler’s name and to warn of the dangers of a fascist state. It was adapted into a 1940 film starring James Stewart.

QUOTE NOTE: Macaulay was making a distinction between prosecution—even when misguided or downright wrong—from persecution. He preceded the thought by writing: “To punish a man because he has committed a a crime, or is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution.”

ERROR ALERT: The exact phrasing is Snyder’s, but in his book he clarified it by writing, “This point of view was expressed eloquently by England’s great epic poet John Milton (1608–1674).” Today, most internet sites mistakenly attribute the quotation directly to Milton.

PERSEVERANCE

(See also EFFORT and ENDURANCE and PATIENCE and PERSISTENCE and STUMBLES & STUMBLING and TENACITY and WORK)

Austin continued: “Continuous effort of itself implies,/In spite of countless falls, the power to rise.” To see how the poem continues, go to ”Perseverance Conquers All”.

ERROR ALERT: In a 1903 anthology of quotations, this observation was mistakenly attributed to Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most popular orators of the era. The mistake has been repeated ever since.

Euripides added: “The coward despairs.”

A moment later, Jobs went on to add: “Unless you have a lot of passion…you’re not going to survive. You’re going to give it up. So you’ve got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you’re passionate about otherwise you’re not going to have the perseverance to stick it through. I think that’s half the battle right there.”

In her book, Ponder also offered this intriguing oxymoronic thought: “Often, failure is success trying to be born in a bigger way, and persistence helps you to experience that greater result.”

PERSISTENCE

(See also EFFORT and ENDURANCE and PATIENCE and PERSEVERANCE and STUMBLES & STUMBLING and TENACITY and WORK)

In her book, Ponder also offered this intriguing oxymoronic thought: “Often, failure is success trying to be born in a bigger way, and persistence helps you to experience that greater result.”

PERSPECTIVE

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

Fisher preceded the thought by writing: “She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned.”

QUOTE NOTE: After winning The Carnegie Medal in 1946, this book became the favorite childhood book of many Baby Boomers, including J. K. Rowling, who said in a 2011 interview: The Little White Horse was my favorite childhood book. I absolutely adored it. It had a cracking plot. It was scary and romantic in parts and had a feisty heroine.” in 2008, the book was adapted into a film titled The Secret of Moonacre.

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

PERSUASION

(includes CONVINCING OTHERS; see also ARGUMENTATIONS & ARGUMENTATION and CONVERSION and INFLUENCE and NEGOTIATION and REASON & REASONING)

Bernbach continued: “For there is evidence that in the field of communications the more intellectual you grow, the more you lose the great intuitive skills that make for the greatest persuasion—the things that really touch and move people.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically reported, but it was originally the concluding portion of a larger thought that began this way: “Leadership is a word and a concept that has been more argued than almost any other I know. I am not one of the desk-pounding type that likes to stick out his jaw and look like he is bossing the show. I would far rather get behind and, recognizing the frailties and the requirements of human nature, I would rather try to persuade a man to go along….”

PESSIMISM & PESSIMISTS

(see also CYNICISM & CYNICS and OPTIMISM & OPTIMISTS and OPTIMISM & PESSIMISM and PERSPECTIVE)

Hardy continued: “Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.”

PESTICIDES

(includes DDT; see also CHEMICALS and CONSERVATION and EARTH and ECOLOGY and ENVIRONMENTALISM and POLLUTION and SMOG)

PETS

(see also ANIMALS and CATS and COMPANIONS and DOGS)

Theroux added: “Animals, particularly dogs, pick up whatever human instability is in the air and become its primary ‘host carrier.’ And since I have always acquired a new pet to calm things down, the various rabbits, gerbils, mice, singing canaries and dogs have absorbed the tension and gone crazy—if they weren’t already crazy when they arrived.”

PH.D. DEGREE

(see also CERTIFICATES and COLLEGE and CREDENTIALS and DEGREES and DIPLOMAS and SCHOOL and UNIVERSITY)

QUOTE NOTE: Parlabane’s quip came in response to another character, who had said: “I’m getting on with the work that will eventually make me a Doctor of Philosophy.”

PHILANTHROPY

(see also CHARITY and KINDNESS and SERVICE and VOLUNTEERS & VOLUNTEERISM)

PHILOSOPHERS

(see also IDEAS and KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC and MIND and PHILOSOPHERS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and PHILOSOPHERS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and PHILOSOPHY and PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION and PRINCIPLES and REASON and RELIGION and SCIENCE and THEOLOGY & THEOLOGIANS and THINKING and TRUTH and WISDOM)

Thoreau concluded: “It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.

PHILOSOPHERS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK

(see also IDEAS and KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC and MIND and PHILOSOPHERS and PHILOSOPHERS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and PHILOSOPHERS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and PHILOSOPHY and PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION and PRINCIPLES and REASON and RELIGION and SCIENCE and THEOLOGY & THEOLOGIANS and THINKING and TRUTH and WISDOM)

PHILOSOPHERS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS

(see also IDEAS and KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC and MIND and PHILOSOPHERS and PHILOSOPHERS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and PHILOSOPHY and PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION and PRINCIPLES and REASON and RELIGION and SCIENCE and THEOLOGY & THEOLOGIANS and THINKING and TRUTH and WISDOM)

PHILOSOPHY

(see also IDEAS and KNOWLEDGE and LOGIC and MIND and PHILOSOPHERS and PHILOSOPHERS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and PHILOSOPHERS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE and PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION and PRINCIPLES and REASON and RELIGION and SCIENCE and THEOLOGY & THEOLOGIANS and THINKING and TRUTH and WISDOM)

Hazlitt preceded the observation by writing: “It is easier taking the beaten path than making our way over bogs and precipices.”

In another entry made later in the year, Kierkegaard wrote: “With every step it takes, philosophy sheds a skin and into it creep the more foolish adherents.”

Rand continued: “Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.”

Russell added: “Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries.”

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

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

(see also IDEAS and KNOWLEDGE and PHILOSOPHY and PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION and PRINCIPLES and REASON and RELIGION and THINKING and TRUTH and WISDOM)

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

PHOTOGRAPHY

(includes PHOTOGRAPHERS and PHOTOGRAPHS; see also ART and ARTISTS and CAMERA and DRAWING and IMAGE and LANDSCAPE and PAINTING and PAPARAZZI and PICTURES and PORTRAIT)

QUOTE NOTE: A few years earlier, in Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (1972 Arbus was quoted as saying, “The camera is a kind of license.”

PHRASES & SAYINGS

(includes WELL-TURNED PHRASE; see also CLICHES and HOMILIES and LANGUAGE and MANTRAS and PROVERBS and QUOTATIONS)

Carnegie continued: “As long as we are learning, developing, contributing, producing or enjoying, we are maturing, whether we are sixteen or ninety-six. We become old when we are no longer capable of improvement, regardless of calendar years.”

Oliver preceded the thought by saying: “The man obviously wanted to tell him something—and as obviously had lost the art of simple narration. Words had become to him a means of obscuring facts—not of revealing them.”

In the essay, Philpott continued: “Not mantras exactly, but go-to choruses that state how things are, that give structure to the chaos and help life make a little more sense.”

Smyth continued: “And inasmuch as the condiments and secret travail of human nature are always the same, and that certain psychological moments must ever and ever recur, what more tempting than to pin down such a moment with the blow of a borrowed hammer?”

PHYSICS & PHYSICISTS

(see also ASTRONOMY & ASTRONOMERS and BIOLOGY & BIOLOGISTS and CHEMISTRY & CHEMISTS and GEOLOGY & GEOLOGISTS and MATHEMATICS & MATHEMATICIANS and METAPHYSICS and OBJECTIVITY and RESEARCH and SCIENCE & SCIENTISTS) and TECHNOLOGY and THEORY

PIANOS & PIANISTS

(see also BLUES and CLASSICAL MUSIC and COMPOSERS & COMPOSITIONS and CONCERTS and CONDUCTORS & CONDUCTING and FOLK MUSIC and JAZZ and MUSIC & MUSICIANS and MUSIC EDUCATION and MUSIC GENRES—N. E. C. and MUSIC METAPHORS and MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS and MUSICIANS—ON THEMSELVES and MUSICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and OPERA and PERFORMANCE & PERFORMERS and PIANOS & PIANISTS and RAGTIME and RAP MUSIC and ROCK & ROLL and RHYTHYM and RHYTHYM & BLUES and SOUND and SONGS & SONWRITERS and SINGING & SINGERS and VOICE)

PIGEONHOLE

(see also BOX and CATEGORIZE and LABEL)

PIGS

(see also ANIMALS and ANIMALS-SPECIFIC TYPES and CATS and DOGS and HORSES and PETS)

PITY

(see also COMPASSION and KINDNESS and SELF-PITY and SYMPATHY)

QUOTE NOTE: The French term au fond means: “at bottom” or “by one’s (or it’s) very nature.”

PLANETS

(see also EARTH and SOLAR SYSTEM and SPACE and UNIVERSE)

PLANS & PLANNING

(includes STRATEGIC PLANNING; see also ANTICIPATION and DECISION-MAKING and EXECUTION and METHOD and PREPARATION and QUALITY and STRATEGY)

QUOTE NOTE: Variations of this legendary military maxim—which is sometimes phrased first encounter with the enemy—have been offered by Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Colin Powell, and other military leaders. In The Quote Verifier (2006), Ralph Keyes says the maxim can be traced to an observation by Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, chief of staff of the Prussian Army for three decades of the nineteenth century. In “On Strategy” (1871), he wrote: “Victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle.” He then went on to conclude: “Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force.” His original essay can be seen at Moltke on "First Contact”. Moltke, who was a disciple of the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, may have been inspired by an earlier observation from his hero (see the Clausewitz entry below).

QUOTE NOTE: This line, originally presented in Scottish dialect, become one of history’s most popular verses, commonly presented as “The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.” The line also inspired the title of John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men.

QUOTE NOTE: Osbon said she heard the remark directly from Campbell and immediately recorded it in her journal.

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, a strikingly similar quotation is attributed to English writer E. M. Forster (“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us”). There is no evidence that Forster ever wrote or said anything like this (sadly, the erroneous attribution now shows up on almost all internet quotation sites.) For more, see this 2017 post by Garson O'Toole, better known as the Quote Investigator.

King introduced the thought by writing about a common mistake people make: “When our plan doesn’t work, we think we failed. So we go at it again in the same way, only this time harder.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has also been commonly presented this way: “If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.”

PLANTS

(includes EATING and FARMING & FARMERS and FOOD and FRUITS and GARDENS and NATURE and VEGETABLES)

PLATITUDES

(see also APHORISMS and EPIGRAMS and MAXIMS and QUOTATIONS and PROVERBS and SAYINGS)

PLAY

(see also GAMES and LEISURE and RECREATION and SPORT and WORK and WORK & PLAY)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites present a mistaken version of the observation (“Play is the brain’s favorite way of learning”).

ERROR ALERT: This observation, in a variety of somewhat similar phrasings, has been mistakenly attributed to many people over the years, including George Bernard Shaw, Herbert Spencer, Ben Franklin, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. An original author has never been conclusively identified.

Brown went on to write: “We don’t need to play all the time to be fulfilled. The truth is that in most cases, play is a catalyst. The beneficial effects of getting just a little true play can spread through our lives, actually making us more productive and happier in everything we do.”

Emerson continued: “Some men must always work if they would be respectable; for the moment they trifle, they are silly. Others show most talent when they trifle.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation is commonly presented, but it originally appeared in this larger observation: “Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning, But for children, play is serious learning. At various times, play is a way to cope with life and to prepare for adulthood. Playing is a way to solve problems and to express feelings. In fact, play is the real work of childhood.”

Sheehan, described by The New York Times as “the philosopher of the recreational running movement,” preceded the thought by writing: “There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you.”

PLAYS & PLAYWRIGHTS

(see also ACTING & ACTORS and AUTHORS and DRAMA and NOVELS & NOVELISTS and STAGE and STORIES & STORYTELLING and THEATER and WRITERS and WRITING)

QUOTE NOTE: Miller would have likely been better understood if he used the more familiar metaphor—chickens coming home to roost—but his point remains the same: the structure of a play is about people ultimately facing the consequences of their actions and choices

Murdoch preceded the thought by writing: “It is very difficult to compress the reflections of one’s characters and the great pattern of a novel into drama where it is a matter of lines and short speeches and actual actors and so on. The forms [drama and fiction] are so different that they can’t possibly be compared.”

Earlier in the direction, Williams wrote: “The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is not the solution of one man’s psychological problems. I’m trying to catch the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent—fiercely charged!—interplay of five human beings in the thundercloud of a common crisis.”

PLEASURE

(includes HEDONISM and PLEASURE-SEEKING; see also HAPPINESS and JOY and MORALITY and PAIN and PLEASURE & PAIN)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites—and many published anthologies—present the following rendition of the thought: “In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.” While beautifully phrased, this is such a liberal translation of Balzac’s original words that it should be considered erroneous. It appears to have been based on yet another translation of the Balzac passage: “Now plunged into the depths of voluptuousness he found that he had gathered more gravel than pearls.”

QUOTE NOTE: Debauchee is now rarely used, but not the word from which it derives. Debauchery is defined by The American Heritage Dictionary this way: “Extreme indulgence in sensual pleasures; dissipation.”

Black continued: “The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose, aiming at something outside self.”

QUOTE NOTE: The book was published in America under the title: Amid These Storms: Thoughts and Adventures.

QUOTE NOTE: The passage has also been translated this way: “Where pleasure is eagerly pursued, the greatest virtues will lose their power.”

Jefferson continued: “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain; and he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks and shoals with which it is beset.”

ERROR ALERT: A similar saying about giving up alcohol as he got older is often attributed to the English writer Kingsley Amis, but never with supporting source information. If Amis ever did say something similar, he was almost certainly inspired by Horace Rumpole’s remark.

PLEASURE & PAIN

(see also HAPPINESS and JOY and MORALITY and PAIN and PLEASURE)

Bentham continued: “It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think; every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly contain the phrase a long and lordly train.

PLEONASM

(see also LOQUACITY & LOQUACIOUSNESS and PROLIXITY and REDUNDANCY and REPETITION and SUPERFLUOUS and TAUTOLOGY and VERBIAGE and VERBOSITY and WORDINESS)

PLOT (as in WRITING)

(see also AUTHORS and BOOKS and LITERATURE and NOVELS & NOVELISTS and STORIES & STORYTELLING and WRITERS and WRITING)

Bradbury added: “Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through.”

Welty preceded the thought by writing: “The fact that stories have plots in common is of no more account than that many people have blue eyes.”

POEM

(see also POETRY and POETS and POETS—ON THEMSELVES and POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

Arendt preceded the thought by writing: “Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”

Auden continued: “It is not the duty of a witness to pass moral judgement on the evidence he has to give, but to give it clearly and accurately; the only crime of which a witness can be guilty is perjury.”

Carlyle finished the thought by writing: “Also, it may be said, there is no life of a man, faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed.” The entire quotation is an example of chiasmus.

Day-Lewis added: “Science too, is always making expeditions into the unknown. But this does not mean that science can supersede poetry. For poetry enlightens us in a different way from science; it speaks directly to our feelings or imagination.”

Eberhart concluded with an observation about literary immortality: “If you have in any way touched the central heart of mankind’s feelings, you’ll survive.”

QUOTE NOTE: In framing this observation, Fenton was almost certainly inspired by a famous quotation from Don Marquis: “Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo” (quoted in E. Anthony, O Rare Don Marquis, 1962).

QUOTE NOTE: This is a re-working of a larger set of thoughts Frost originally expressed in a letter to Louis Untermeyer (Jan. 1, 1916). He wrote: “A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. That’s why it oftener comes to nothing in youth before experience has filled the mind with thoughts. It may be a big big [sic] emotion then and yet finds nothing it can embody in. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. Let’s say again: A poem particularly must not begin with thought first.”

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation is almost always presented as if were the complete thought, but in the essay, Frost continued: “A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.”

This is the opening couplet of one of history’s most famous poems—and one of its most frequently parodied. For the complete poem, and more on its history, go to “Trees”.

Kunitz continued chiastically: “Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life.”

Pratt added: “But to go in here is to enter where my own suffering exists as an almost unheard low note in the music, amplified, almost unbearable.”

Strand clarified the meaning of this observation by saying: “The reader has to sort of give himself over to the poem and allow the poem to inhabit him and—how does the poem do that? It does it by rearranging the world in such a way that it appears new. It does it by using language that is slightly different from the way language is used in the workday world, so that you’re forced to pay attention to it.” A transcript of the full interview is available at “The Pulitzer Poet”.

QUOTATION CAUTION: Almost all anthologies and internet sites present Valéry as saying: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” In doing so, they’ve followed the lead of W. H. Auden, whose 1970 book A Certain World offered what can only be described as a liberal translation of Valéry’s original thought. In Valéry’s original phrasing, the concept of abandonment is not even suggested: Une poème n’est jamais achevé—c’est toujours un accident qui le termine. A similar quotation has long been attributed to the American sportswriter–turned–screenwriter Gene Fowler: “A book is never finished, it is abandoned.” See the Fowler entry in BOOKS.

ERROR ALERT: Almost all quotation sites, including Wikiquote, mistakenly present the first portion of the remark this way: “The poem…is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.” The Saturday Review piece was taken from Warren’s speech accepting the 1958 National Book Award for Promises: Poems 1954–1956.

POETRY

(see also LIMERICK and POEM and POETRY & PROSE and POETS and POETS—ON THEMSELVES and POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

QUOTE NOTE: Blackburn, an English poet and professor, preceded the observation with one of the best opening lines I’ve ever seen in a critical essay: “A psychologist once said that we know little about the conscience except that it is soluble in alcohol.”‬

In that lecture, Carlyle also said on the subject: “Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.”

QUOTE NOTE: Ciardi may have been inspired by a famous observation from Pablo Picasso (to be found in ART).

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is almost always presented, but the fuller version is as follows: “Poetry is a religion without hope, but its martyrs guarantee the eternal truth of its dogma.”

Cohen added: “Next time you experience impatience, you can transform it into interest through the lens of a poem. Next time you feel anger, you can dig deeper and find the awe underneath. This is the gift of poetry. You can write yourself where you need to go.”

QUOTE NOTE: Dickinson, a prominent critic of the era, wrote the letter after his first face-to-face meeting with Dickinson at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts (the two had been corresponding since 1862). An article on “Emily Dickinson’s Letters” in an 1891 issue of The Atlantic mistakenly suggested the observation appeared in a letter Dickinson had written. According to Higginson, Dickinson concluded by saying: “These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

Frost preceded the observation by writing: “Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether, and I ask myself what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they do something; unless they amount to deeds, as in ultimatums or battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker, from which there is no appeal.”

Goldsmith added: “It consistes of imagery, description, metaphors, similes, and sentiments, adapted with propriety to the subject, so contrived and executed as to soothe the ear, surrprise and delight the fancy, mend and melt the heart, elevate the mind, and please the understanding.” Earlier, Goldsmith introduced the entire subject in an equally eloquent way when he wrote that poetry “has a language of its own, which speaks so feelingly to the heart, and so pleasingly to the imagination, that its meaning cannot possibly be misunderstood by any person of delicate sensations.”

Graves continued: “Its use is the experience of mixed exultation and horror that her presence excites.”

ERROR ALERT: On nearly all internet sites and in many quotation collections, this line is mistakenly presented as: “Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.” In the original passage, I believe Gray was referring to the creations of such great poets as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden.

Kunitz went on to write: “Poetry, it cannot be denied, requires a mastery of craft, but it is more than a playground for technicians. The craft that I admire most manifests itself not as an aggregate of linguistic or prosodic skills, but as a form of spiritual testimony, the sign of the inviolable self consolidated against the enemies within and without that would corrupt or destroy human pride and dignity.”

QUOTE NOTE: Kunitz’s use of the phrase “I have insisted” suggested an earlier appearance of the sentiment. Sure enough, he was recycling a thought that originally appeared in a 1985 essay in the journal Antaeus: “Poetry is ultimately mythology, the telling of stories of the soul. The old myths, the old gods, the old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our minds, waiting for our call. We have need of them, never more desperately than now, for in their sum they epitomize the wisdom and experience of the race.”

Lorde went on to add: “Poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.”

Lowell continued: “Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.”

QUOTE NOTE: The words come from the novel’s narrator, William Ashenden. He added: “It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.” The entire observation (without the final piece of cheese portion) graced the cover of a 1957 Saturday Review issue titled “Accent on Poetry”.

Mill continued: “Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.”

A moment later, Norris wrote: “Poets are used to discovering, years after a poem is written, what it’s really about.”

Pound preceded the thought by writing: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance.”

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites present the following abridged version of the thought: “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”

About poetry, Rich also wrote in the book: “I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.”

Sexton added: “The rest of it is leftovers.”

Shelley’s influential essay on the central importance of poetry in human life also included these other memorable metaphorical observations:

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.

Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.

Poetry is a sword of lightning, ever unsheathed, which consumes the scabbard that would contain it.

Poetry strengthens that faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man, in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb.

Stevens continued with this concluding line of the essay: “It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”

In that same section of the book, Stevens also wrote: “Poetry is a search for the inexplicable.”

According to Wyndham, Thomas went on to add: “I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets.”

QUOTE NOTE: Many books and internet sites present the quotation as if it began: Poetry is the spontaneous….

POETRY & PROSE

(see also POEM and POETRY & PROSE and POETS and POETS—ON THEMSELVES and POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

Lorde went on to add: “Poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time.”

QUOTE NOTE: The words come from the novel’s narrator, William Ashenden. He added: “It is the achievement of beauty. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes; he makes the best of us look like a piece of cheese.” The entire observation (without the final piece of cheese portion) graced the cover of a 1957 Saturday Review issue titled “Accent on Poetry”.

POETS

(see also POEM and POETRY and POETS—ON THEMSELVES and POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

QUOTE NOTE: Adams, a great lover of poetry, was advising his son to always travel with a volume of poetry. In the letter, pocket was originally spelled poket.

QUOTE NOTE: For Brodsky, the poet he knew from cover to cover was W. H. Auden. Brodsky’s essay concluded with this wonderful story about his favorite poet: “I saw him last in July 1973, at a supper at Stephen Spender’s place in London. Wystan [Auden’s formal first name] was sitting there at the table, a cigarette in his right hand, a goblet in his left, holding forth on the subject of cold salmon. The chair being too low, two disheveled volumes of the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] were put under him by the mistress of the house. I thought then that I was seeing the only man who had the right to use those volumes as his seat.” Thanks to David Evans for drawing the OED anecdote to my attention.

Coleridge concluded the observation with a piece advice to poets: “Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection; and trust more to your imagination than to your memory.”

Collins continued: “Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly—it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers—enough to bring on waves of paranoia.”

QUOTE NOTE: A half century earlier, during his famous tour of America, Oscar Wilde made a strikingly similar point: “Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry” (quoted in The Philadelphia Press, Jan. 17, 1882).

Graves introduced the thought by writing: “The difference between prose logic and poetic thought is simple. The logician uses words as a builder uses bricks, for the unemotional deadness of his academic prose; and is always coining newer, deader words with a natural preference for Greek formations.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly attribute the sentiment to James Dickey, and in this abridged form: “A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.”

Lowell preceded the observation by writing: “Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.”

QUOTE NOTE: The writer and poet Louis Phillips was inspired by Shelley's words when he composed this clever little ditty titled “Love and Fame” (2024):

“Poets food is love and fame,/But I prefer whiskey & champagne./No wonder nobody knows my name.”

About the poet’s peers and readers—those who ultimately determine the poet’s reputation in the world—Shelley added: “His auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.”

QUOTE NOTE: In composing this thought—one of literary history’s most famous quotations—Shelley might have been influenced by an earlier observation from Samuel Johnson. In his History of Rasselas (1759), Johnson described the role of the poet this way: “He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations.” Both observations began to be seen in a different light as centuries passed. In The Dyer’s Hand (1962), W. H. Auden had totalitarianism on his mind when he wrote: “‘The unacknowledged legislators of the world’ describe the secret police, not the poets.”

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites present the following abridged version of the thought: “The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.”

Yeats preceded the observation by writing: “Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.”

Yevtushenko continued: “A poet is only a poet when the reader can see him whole as if he held him in the hollow of his hand with all his feelings, thoughts, and actions.”

POETS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK

(see also POEM and POETRY and POETS and POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

Auden added: “If he is too tyrannical, they give notice; if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk, and dishonest.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is often described as Frost’s epitaph, and it is true that the words do appear on Frost’s gravestone in the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont. Frost died twenty-two years after the poem was written, and it is not clear that he intended the saying as his final words. But that is exactly what happened when, shortly after his death, surviving family members had the saying inscribed on his gravestone. The saying became indelibly associated with Frost after the broadcast of a 1963 PBS documentary titled Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World. For more on the saying, go to “This Day in Quotes”.

Jacobsen continued: “It’s like the difficulty of trying to climb a mountain: the chances that you are going to fall are very steep, and the sense of triumph if you get there is very strong.”

QUOTE NOTE: Vyazemsky was Pushkin’s closest friend. Both came from noble families, and both wrote poetry—but for different reasons. Pushkin began by writing: “Aristocratic prejudices are suitable for you but not for me.”

In an interview broadcast on April 4, 1976 on WNET, New York City’s public radio station, host Bill Moyers asked Warren if the process of writing poems and novels was painful. Warren replied: “It’s a kind of pain I can’t do without. I can’t say I like it, but I can’t do without it. It’s the old thing of scratching where you itch.”

POETS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS

(see also POEM and POETRY and POETS and POETS—ON THEMSELVES and RHYME and SONNETS and VERSE)

Auden continued in a metaphorical vein, but this time about another British poet: Algernon Swinburne: “There are others, Swinburne, for example, who remind one more about Svengali: under their hypnotic suggestion, an extraordinary performance is put on, not by raw recruits, but by feeble-minded schoolchildren.”

Jong was referring to the appearance of seven Plath poems in an August 3, 1963 issue of The New Yorker. Jong wrote: “They were by a poet whose name was not yet familiar to readers but whose voice sounded like no other. Under these poems was the intriguing attribution: Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). Since there was no Contributor’s section in Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, readers had no idea who the author of these astonishing poems might be. Her name was followed by the ominous double dates confirming that the author was no longer on this sad planet.”

POINT OF NO RETURN

(see (No) RETURN)

POISE

(see also APLOMB and BEARING and CALMNESS and COOLNESS and EQUANIMITY and GRACE and POLISH)

Adams was describing how people with perfect poise—like great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams—are often misunderstood, and mistakenly viewed as cold or uncaring. He continued: “What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused…but it is not amused by perfect balance.”

Allen preceded the thought by writing: “It is a question whether the great majority of people do not ruin their lives and mar their happiness by lack of self-control.”

Thomson preceded the thought by saying: “You will find that the great American hostesses all spent time in Florence.”

QUOTE NOTE In 1976, Reader’s Digest presented the observation with a slightly different phrasing (“Poise: the ability to be ill at ease inconspicuously”), and this latter version is the one that is best known today.

POISON & POISON METAPHORS

(see also TOXINS)

(see also metaphors involving ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BATHING & BATHS, BIRDS, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CANCER, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, GARDENING, HEART, JOURNEYS, LADDERS, LIGHT & LIGHTNESS, MOTHERS, PARTS OF SPEECH, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, ROAD, NAUTICAL, SUN & MOONS, VEGETABLES, and WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

QUOTE NOTE: This saying, in pretty much this phrasing, went on to achieve great popularity after it was tweaked by others (see the entries below from Susan Cheever, Carrie Fisher, Anne Lamott, Malachy McCourt, and Neil Kinnock). Thanks to Barry Popik of The Big Apple website for his research. The underlying sentiment that negative emotions toward others are like a poison that can harm the person harboring them goes back more than a century. See the Bert Ghezzi entry for the earliest appearance of the specific resentment variation.

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to be the earliest version of a sentiment that has become almost proverbial under the phrasing Resentment is like taking a poison and waiting for the other person to die (see variations on the theme in entries in this section by Alan Brandt, Susan Cheever, Carrie Fisher, Anne Lamott, Malachy McCourt, and Neil Kinnock). Thanks to Garson O’Toole, the Quote Investigator, for his impressive research on this quotation (O'Toole’s informative 2017 post identifies even earlier sayings that compare hatred and other negative emotions to a poison).

QUOTE NOTE: While many Reader’s Digest quotations are of questionable authenticity, this one should be considered legitimate. In a personal communication to this compiler in February, 2016, Lord Kinnock recalled making the remark in an interview on ITV, an independent British television network, in 1993.

In the book, Lee also wrote: “Information is power. Disinformation is abuse of power.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is regarded as the original observation that ultimately morphed into the proverb. “One man’s meat is another man's poison.”

QUOTE NOTE: Over the centuries, this passage has been translated in a variety of slightly varying ways:

“But men are so imprudent that they take up a diet which, as it tastes good to start with, they do not realize is poisonous.”

“But lack of prudence in men begins something in which, because it tastes good then, they do not perceive the poison that lies underneath.”

“The scanty wisdom of man, on entering into an affair which looks well at first, cannot discern the poison that is hidden in it.”

“But men have so little judgment and foresight that they initiate policies that seem attractive, without noticing any poison that is concealed.”

* I am afraid of people/who cannot cry/Tears left unshed/turn to poison/in the ducts. Alice Walker, from the poem “S M” (1979), in Horses Make a Landscape More Beautiful (1979)

QUOTE NOTE: Walker was clearly thinking about men when she wrote this. She went on to write: “People who do not cry/are victims/of soul mutilation/paid for in Marlboros/and trucks.”

POKER

(see also BETTING and CARDS and CHANCE and DICE and GAMING and GAMBLING & GAMBLERS and GAMBLING METAPHORS and GAMES and GAMING & GAMES OF CHANCE and LOTTERY and POKER and SPECULATION and WINNING & LOSING)

ERROR ALERT: Variations of this saying have been attributed to Warren Buffett, the legendary poker player Amarillo Slim, and even Paul Newman. According to Garson O'Toole, aka The Quote Investigator, the saying first appeared in a 1979 Atlantic Monthly article, when author John D. Spooner attributed the saying to a mythical financial advisor named Whispering Saul.

In a 1988 letter to his shareholders, Warren Buffett offered a variant saying when he wrote: “As they say in poker, ‘If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.’”

Harrington continued: “This approach can be effective, but for normal people it's hard to pull off. (If you’ve spent part of your life in an institution, this method may come naturally.)”

POLICE & POLICING

(including COPS; see also CRIME and JUSTICE and LAW ENFORCEMENT and LAW & ORDER)

He preceded the thought by writing: “Cops never took anything on faith, and disbelieved every story that was told them on principle until and unless they could confirm that the story was fact in all its essentials, and even then remained wary and unconvinced.”

POLITENESS

(see also BREEDING and CIVILITY and COURTESY and ETIQUETTE and GRACE & GRACIOUSNESS and KINDNESS and MANNERS and PROTOCOL and RUDENESS and SENSITIVITY and TACT)

DENIS

POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS

(see also CONGRESS and ELECTIONS and GOVERNMENT & GOVERNING and LEADERS and LEADERSHIP and POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS & ELECTIONS and POLITICAL PARTIES and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and POLITICS & RELIGION and PRESIDENTS & THE PRESIDENCY and STATESMEN/STATESWOMEN and WASHINGTON, D.C.)

Ivins continued: “We have a government of special interests, by special interests, and for special interests. And that will not change until we change the way campaigns are financed.”

In his post, Schmidt continued: “The process destroys the weak and brittle. It exposes dilettantism in the most brutal manner possible. The process is a journey and most people don’t make it to the end because they fail the test.”

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

(see also EUPHEMISM)

POLITICAL PARTIES

(includes DEMOCRATS and REPUBLICANS and THIRD PARTIES; see also POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICIANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS)

Hofstadter preceded the thought by writing: “When a third party’s demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears.“

QUOTE NOTE: This is a famous observation about political life. What is less well known is a remarkable insight Mill went on to offer about it: “Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.”

In his book, O’Brien explained: “Rogers was a lifelong Democrat but he studiously avoided partisanship. He contributed to the Democratic campaign funds, but at the same time he frequently appeared on benefit programs to raise money for the Republican treasury. Republican leaders sought his counsel in their campaigns as often as did the Democrats.”

POLITICIANS

(see also CONGRESS and ELECTIONS and GOVERNING and GOVERNMENT & THE STATE and LEADERS & LEADERSHIP and POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS and POLITICAL PARTIES and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and POLITICS & RELIGION and PRESIDENTS & THE PRESIDENCY and PRESIDENTS—ON THEMSELVES & THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY and STATESMEN/STATESWOMEN and WASHINGTON, D.C.)

QUOTE NOTE: There are a number of variations of this popular American sentiment, which first emerged in the early 1990s. The saying is often attributed to Robin Williams, or to screenwriter Barry Levinson, who gave the words to Williams’s character Tom Dobbs—the comic turned presidential candidate—in the 2006 film Man of the Year. For more on the history of the saying, see this post by quotation sleuth Barry Popik.

QUOTE NOTE: Many people think this analogy is about the attempt of House Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, but it was written almost a quarter of a century earlier in response to calls from House Democrats to impeach Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal.

The grandfather continued: “And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.”

QUOTE NOTE: According to quotation researchers Hugh Rawson and Margaret Miner, this saying has been attributed to Cameron since the 1850s. Cameron was a highly successful Pennsylvania businessman who turned to politics, winning a U. S. Senate seat as a Democrat in 1845. A staunch opponent of slavery, he became a Republican in 1856. President Lincoln named him as his Secretary of War in 1861.

QUOTE NOTE: This looks like the first appearance of the now-popular next election/next generation distinction between politicians and statesmen. Clarke, a prominent Unitarian minister, abolitionist, and exponent of what went on to be called the Social Gospel, continued: “The politician thinks about the success of his party, the statesman of the good of his country. The politician wishes to carry this or that measure, the statesman to establish this or that principle. Finally, the statesman wishes to steer; while the politician is contented to drift.”

ERROR ALERT: This is the way the quotation almost always appears, even showing up this way in Fodor’s 2007 Mexico travel guide. It's a rephrasing of the words Deighton originally used in his 1985 novel Mexico Set, where a character describes a marginally effective air conditioner. The original passage reads:

“It makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well, explained Werner. “The Mexicans call them ‘politicians.’”

The explanation for the faulty wording can be traced to a brief description of the novel in a 1985 issue of The New Yorker magazine. It reads in part: “We learn, among other things, that in Mexico an air-conditioner is called a ‘politician’: ‘It makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.’”

Goodwin continued: “Individuals and institutions achieve their ends through continual barter. But deals are not bonds. Indeed, intense emotional involvement with anything—with issues, ideology, a woman, even a family—can be a handicap, not only consuming valuable time, but more importantly, reducing flexibility and the capacity for detached calculation needed to take maximum advantage of continually changing circumstances.”

Jong began by writing: “We expect them to lie to us. We grant them latitude to lie. We are lax about holding them to their word.”

QUOTE NOTE: Not much was known of this now-famous observation by Lippmann until the following year when it was quoted in John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Profiles in Courage. In Lippmann’s original essay, he referred to the phenomenon he was describing as “The democratic malady.” He continued: “The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular—not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.”

QUOTE NOTE: According to Jones, Lord Tenby, the youngest son of David Lloyd George (English Prime Minister from 1916–22), made this remark shortly after being appointed Home Secretary by Winston Churchill. Jones went on to add: “A strange remark from a Conservative Home Secretary and one who was the son of the arch-monkey himself.” Similar remarks about politicians and the rear ends of monkeys have been attributed to others, but this looks like the earliest appearance.

QUOTE NOTE: “Controverse” is a satirical look at political handlers instructing politicians on how to come across to voters as sincere. It began: “Look the camera in the eye/Keep the chin line firm,/Sit with nonchalance and try/Not to shift or squirm.”

When Bill Clinton began his political career, according to Maraniss, he studied and carefully copied the mannerisms of such successful Arkansas politicians as Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. Maraniss concluded about Clinton: “It is not a contradiction to say that he was both a natural politician and an artful imitator, for those two types may in fact be one and the same.”

QUOTE NOTE: Mencken might have been inspired by an oxymoronic observation long attributed—without verification—to the American politician Simon Cameron (1799–1889): “An honest politician is one who when he’s bought stays bought.”

Miller preceded the observation by saying: “The idealists in politics lack a sense of reality. And a politician must be a realist above all. These people with ideals and principles, they’re all at sea, in my opinion.”

Murrow was speaking at a BBC-sponsored conference on “Television and Politics.” He preceded the remark by saying about American politicians: “Most of them are men of undoubted charm, ability, and incredible energy, and yet too often they lack purpose or appetite for anything beyond their own careers. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.”

Powell is also widely credited with another popular—but so far unverified—observation about politicians: “No one is forced to be a politician. It can only be compared with fox hunting and writing poetry. These are two things that men do for sheer enjoyment, too.”

POLITICIANS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK

(see also POLITICS & POLITICIANs and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS)

QUOTE NOTE: Churchill gave the speech at a special ceremony in celebration of his eightieth birthday. Just earlier, Labor Party leader Clement Attlee paid tribute to Churchill’s role in WWII by saying: “You offered us only blood and sweat and tears and we gladly took your offer.” When Churchill took the stage, he thanked Mr. Attlee but humbly suggested that he was merely expressing the resolve of freedom-loving people everywhere. He then preceded his famous give the roar quotation above with these words about the English people: “Their will was resolute and remorseless and, as it proved, unconquerable. It fell to me to express it, and if I found the right words you must remember that I have always earned my living by my pen and by my tongue.”

QUOTE NOTE: When a White House staffer informed LBJ about a new hire, the president asked, “How loyal is that man?” When his aide replied, “Well, he seems quIte loyal,” LBJ replied as above.

QUOTE NOTE: For the full quotation, and the original observation that inspired it, see the Kennedy entry in HAPPINESS

Nixon concluded: “And I guess if I had been in their position, I’d have done the same thing.”

Thatcher continued: “That is why my father always taught me: never worry about anyone who attacks you personally; it means their arguments carry no weight and they know it.”

QUOTE NOTE: While serving as the British prime minister, Thatcher had famously said: “Consensus is the negation of leadership.”

QUOTE NOTE: Wilson, who was serving as Prime Minister of England at the time, was warning Laborites about the danger of yielding to the demands of a dogmatic minority within their ranks. He preceded the remark by saying: “The party must protect itself against the activities of small groups of inflexible political persuasion…having in common only their arrogant dogmatism.”

Woodrow Wilson, a 1914 remark, quoted in Eugene C. Brooks, Woodrow Wilson as President (1916)

POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS

(see also POLITICS & POLITICIANs and POLITICIANS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK)

The grandfather continued: “And what will be the end of such ways? I will tell you. We shall have a Democracy that will be the reign of those who know the least and talk the loudest.”

QUOTE NOTE: This remark came during a discussion of the 2012 fiscal cliff debacle. Brooks assigned “most of the blame” to the Republican Party, stating that party leaders had a “brain freeze” since the election and “have no strategy.” He didn’t hold President Obama blameless, though, charging that he had not engaged with Republicans in a way that built trust.

QUOTE NOTE: Herndon was a former law partner of the 16th president.

Ivins continued in the second paragraph: “I should explain that I am not without bias in this matter. I have been attacked by Rush Limbaugh on the air, an experience somewhat akin to being gummed by a newt. It doesn’t actually hurt, but it leaves you with slimy stuff on your ankle.”

QUOTE NOTE: Her physician, who had just heard the remark from another patient, said he couldn’t wait to pass it along to the sharp-tongued daughter of Theodore Roosevelt. Often called “Washington’s other monument” for the larger-than-life role she played in the nation’s capital, Mrs. Longworth loved the line and went on to say about it: “Of course I shouted with pleasure and told everyone, always carefully giving credit to the unnamed originator, but in a very short time it was attributed to me.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is often misinterpreted as a swipe at President Reagan’s intelligence, but Noonan (a Reagan speechwriter and great fan of the president) was in fact commenting on his disinterest in—and detachment from—the details of governance.

ERROR ALERT: Many books and web sites mistakenly report that Henry Clay was the target of this legendary metaphorical insult. John F. Kennedy even got it wrong in Profiles in Courage (1957), where he described the line as “the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse.” But Randolph, a Virginia congressman hailed by William Safire as a “master of American political invective,” said it about Edward Livingston, a former New York City mayor who had been elected to Congress. In 1998, Bill Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts, titled his first novel, Mackerel by Moonlight. Appropriately, it was a tale of political corruption.

Richards, the state treasurer of Texas at the time, stepped grandly on to the national stage when she delivered a rousing address. The remark, a clever blending of two popular idiomatic expressions, was a nifty two-fisted jab—referring both to the former president’s trouble talking as well as his privileged background.

QUOTE NOTE: Early that morning, the congresswoman from Colorado was preparing scrambled eggs for her children’s breakfast when a thought popped into her mind: “He’s just like a Teflon frying pan. Nothing sticks to him.” For months, Shroeder had been mystified by President Reagan’s ability to remain unscathed after missteps and blunders by people in his administration. A few hours later, she unveiled the image to her congressional colleagues. Almost immediately, the metaphor began to take on a life of its own. And exactly one week later, The New York Times helped make the phrase a part of the political lexicon when it offered ”The Teflon Presidency” as a headline in its “Required Reading” feature.

POLITICS

(see also CONGRESS and ELECTIONS and GOVERNING and GOVERNMENT & THE STATE and LEADERS & LEADERSHIP and POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS and POLITICAL PARTIES and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICIANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and POLITICS & RELIGION and PRESIDENTS and STATESMEN/STATESWOMEN and VOTING & VOTERS and WASHINGTON, D.C.)

QUOTE NOTE: The book, a classic in American literature, included two other observations that went on to achieve an almost legendary status in the political realm: “Practical politics consists in ignoring facts” and “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”

AUTHOR NOTE: Bevan, whose nickname was “Nye,” was a Welsh miner and labor activist who used the great General Strike of 1926 to launch a highly successful political career. As England’s Minister of Health (1945-51), he played the key role in getting the National Health Service adopted, famously explaining that he got English doctors to go along with the program this way: “I stuffed their mouths with gold!”

In her book, Chisholm also wrote: “Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power.”

QUOTE NOTE: See the Clausewitz entry in WAR for his even more famous observation on the connection between war and politics.

QUOTE NOTE: This is the original expression of a sentiment that ultimately evolved into politics makes strange bedfellows, a saying that went on to become so popular that it completely supplanted the Shakespeare observation that inspired it (see the Shakespeare entry in MISERY. The sentiment about politics making for strange bedfellows has been attributed to many other people, including Charles Dudley Warner, who wrote in My Summer in a Garden (1871): “I may mention here, since we are on politics…that politics makes strange bed-fellows.” Gifford, however, deserves credit as the person who first extended the concept from misery to politics.

ERROR ALERT: The quotation is often mistakenly presented: “All the contact I have had with politics has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spittoons.”

QUOTE NOTE: In her book, Ivins neatly summarized the situation this way: “We just need to get the hogs out of the creek so the water can clear up.”

This was the conclusion of Jones’s answer to a question about whether his recent move from a home in Illinois to a flat in Paris was a political gesture. The author of From Here to Eternity (1951) said he didn’t like politics and didn’t make political gestures, adding: “I don’t even believe in politics. To me politics is like one of those annoying, and potentially dangerous (but generally just painful) chronic diseases that you just have to put up with in your life if you happen to have contracted it.”

QUOTE NOTE: Krauthammer, who left a promising career in psychiatry to spend three decades covering politics as a journalist, was planning to title his career-reflecting book There’s More to Life Than Politics. But he simply couldn’t. He explained: “While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space, sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity, elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.”

QUOTE NOTE: Note also the metaphorical title of Lerner’s book.

QUOTE NOTE: This famous quotation is an example of the literary device known as chiasmus, but it may also be accurately viewed as a double metaphor.

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, William E. Gladstone is mistakenly credited with saying “Nothing, that is morally wrong, can be politically right.” He never said anything of the sort. More is the legitimate author of the sentiment.

Moyers added: “The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.”

President Obama continued the sailing metaphor by adding that those steering the ship of state “have to take into account winds and currents and occasionally the lack of any wind, so that you’re just sitting there for a while, and sometimes you’re being blown all over the place.”

QUOTE NOTE: see spin-off quotations by Thomas L. Friedman above and by Peggy Noonan in ECONOMICS.

Oppenheimer added: “We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that the wages of secrecy are corruption. We know that in secrecy error, undetected, will flourish and subvert.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is one of the Canadian prime minister’s most frequently quoted remarks, appearing in almost every anthology of political quotations. The sentiment wasn't original to Pearson, though, and he went out of his way to credit a former professor with authorship. Here’s what he said in a June 8, 1967 speech to the Canadian Political Science Association (note also his second oldest profession reference, which may have inspired Ronald Reagan’s more famous observation on the subject—to be seen below):

I beg you not to despise the profession of politics. It’s the second oldest in history, much more reputable even if less rewarding than the oldest, whether you define politics as the science and art of government, or, more originally, as one of my professors did at Toronto many years ago, as “the skillful use of blunt instruments.”

QUOTE NOTE: President Reagan was famous for “borrowing” lines from other sources and casually passing them off as his own. This one was likely inspired by a similar politics/prostitution reference made by Lester B. Pearson in 1967—seen just above.

QUOTE NOTE: This is the first appearance of a phrase (“the lunatic fringe”) that has now become commonplace. While Roosevelt was thinking about crazies in the fringe elements of reform movements, his expression is now routinely used to describe fanatics and extremists who exist in all political undertakings.

I’ve also seen the passage translated this way: “Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”

British prime minister Margaret Thatcher might have had this observation in mind when she said about the political abuse heaped on her: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because…it means that they have not a single political argument left” (quoted in London’s Daily Telegraph, March 21, 1986)

Thoreau’s entry continued: “And the two political parties are its two opposite halves which grind on each other.”

QUOTE NOTE: At the time, the 40-year-old Unruh (pronounced UN-rue) was a major force in California’s Democratic Party, Speaker of the State Assembly, and one of California's most colorful and flamboyant politicians (his 265-pound frame inspired Raquel Welch to give him the nickname “Big Daddy”). The remark, which captured the increasingly influential role of Big Money in politics, immediately caught fire, went on to become one of the most popular quotes of the era, and earned Unruh an entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. By the end of the century, as Unruh’s observation began to suffer from overexposure, another colorful state politician—Jim Hightower of Texas—stepped up to the plate with an updated version: “Money is the crack cocaine of politics.”

Vargas Llosa continued: “It consists almost exclusively of maneuvers, intrigues, plots, paranoias, betrayals, a great deal of calculation, no little cynicism, and every variety of con game. Because what really gets the professional politician, whether of the center, the left, or the right, moving, what excites him and keeps him going is power, attaining it, remaining in it, or returning to it as soon as possible.”

Vidal preceded the thought by writing: “I think it is tragic that the poor man has almost no chance to rise unless he is willing to put himself in thrall to moneyed interests.”

White continued: “And that religion begins with the founding faith of the Declaration of Independence,

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites and published quotation anthologies mistakenly present this quotation as if it were phrased either grows or swells. Thanks to Andrew Phillips of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library for providing the correct wording.

POLITICS & RELIGION

(see also CHURCH & STATE and DEMAGOGUES & DEMAGOGY and GOVERNING and GOVERNMENT & THE STATE and POLITICS & POLITICIANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and RELIGION)

Blackmun introduced the thought by writing: “The mixing of government and religion can be a threat to free government, even if no one is forced to participate.”

In his talk, Dawkins continued:

“If I’m right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it—the intelligentsia—unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.”

Heinlein continued: “This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.”

The proverb continued: “Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

Robbins continued: “Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”

POLLUTION

(see also CHEMICALS and CONSERVATION and EARTH and ECOLOGY and ENVIRONMENTALISM and PESTICIDES and SMOG)

Carson continued: “But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.”

Carson’s classic work also offered these other observations of the subject of pollution:

“As crude a weapon as a cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.”

“Under the philosophy that now seems to guide our destinies, nothing must get in the way of the man with the spray gun.”

“As man proceeds toward his announced goal of the conquest of nature, he has written a depressing record of destruction, directed not only against the earth he inhabits but against the life that shares it with him.”

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one ‘less traveled by’—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

POLYGAMY & POLYAMORY

(see also BIGAMY and DIVORCE and FAMILY and HUSBANDS & WIVES and MARRIAGE and [Gay] MARRIAGE and MÉNAGE À TROIS and MONOGAMY)

ERROR ALERT: For many years, this saying was attributed to William James, who reportedly said that the saying had come to him after an experiment with a psychedelic drug. This is now believed to be false.

POMPOSITY

(see also AFFECTATION and AUTHENTICITY and KNOWLEDGE and PEDANTRY & PEDANTS and PRETENSION & PRETENTIOUSNESS and SCHOLARS & SCHOLARSHIP and STUDY)

POOL & BILLIARDS

(see also ATHLETES & ATHLETICISM and COMPETITION and DEFEAT and EXERCISE & FITNESS and GAMES and OLYMPICS and SPORT & SPORTS and SPORTSMANSHIP and SPORTSWRITERS and TEAM and VICTORY and WINNING & LOSING)

(also includes SNOOKER; see also the specific sports of BASEBALL and BASKETBALL and BOXING and FISHING and FOOTBALL and GOLF and HOCKEY and HUNTING and MOUNTAINEERING & ROCK-CLIMBING and RUNNING & JOGGING and SAILING & YACHTING and SOCCER and SPORT—SPECIFIC TYPES N.E.C. and SWIMMING and TENNIS and TRACK & FIELD and WALKING and WRESTLING)

[The] POOR

(see POVERTY & THE POOR)

POPULARITY

(see also CELEBRITY and EMINENCE and FAME and GLORY and HONORS and OBSCURITY and PUBLICITY and PUBLIC OPINION and REPUTATION and STARDOM and SUCCESS)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the most common current translation of Hugo’s famous observation, but earlier renditions of the thought are also memorable: “Popularity? The cheapest kind of glory.” and “Popularity—a piece of faded tinsel, that is out of date.”

PORNOGRAPHY

(see also CENSORSHIP and EROTICA and EROS & EROTICISM and LUST and OBSCENITY and ORGASM and SENSUALITY and SEX)

Davis continued: “Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit—a twenty-second best.”

PORTRAITS

(see also ART and [Work of] ART and ARTIST and ARTISTS—ON THEMSELVES & THEIR WORK and ARTISTS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and FACE and PAINTING & PAINTERS and SCULPTURE & SCULPTORS)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the origin of the expression warts and all to indicate that even unattractive or ugly aspects of something should not be—or have not been—ignored.

QUOTATION CAUTION: Even though Sargent is regarded as one of history’s great portraitists, he grew to hate this aspect of his work as he grew older, once even saying to a friend: “I hate to paint portraits. I hope never to paint another portrait in my life.” The more popular quotation above about losing a friend whenever he painted a portrait is of questionable validity though. An original source has never been provided, and its first published appearance was in Esar’s 1949 book.

Hallward continued: “The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.”

POSITION

(see also IMPORTANCE & UNIMPORTANCE and POWER and RANK and STATUS)

POSITIVE (as in CERTAINTY)

(see also CERTAINTY and CORRECT and RIGHT [as in CORRECT] and WRONG)

QUOTE NOTE: In this observation, McDonnell is playing off “None so blind as those that will not see,” a proverbial English saying popularized by Matthew Henry in his Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708)

POSITIVE (opposite of NEGATIVE)

(includes POSITIVE THINKING; see also AFFIRMATIVE and ENTHUSIASM and NEGATIVE and OPTIMISM and UPBEAT)

In her scathing critique of the positive thinking movement in America, Ehrenreich also offered these thoughts:

“It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations.”

“The seeker who embraces positive theology finds … that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can.”

“When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where…the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of critical thinking.”

“How can we expect to improve our situation without addressing the actual circumstances we find ourselves in? Positive thinking seeks to convince us that such external factors are incidental compared with one’ s internal state or attitude or mood.”

In her book, Ponder also wrote: “If you speak of things, people, and conditions in a positive, prosperous way, you gain their subconscious cooperation. Whereas, if you criticize your world, you repel its blessings and attract only negative, limited conditions into your life.”

POSITIVE THINKING

(see POSITIVE (opposite of NEGATIVE))

POSSESSIONS

(includes THINGS; see also ACQUISITION and BELONGINGS and [Conspicuous] CONSUMPTION and CRAVING and DESIRE and EXCESS and HAVING and LUXURY and MATERIALISM and OWNERSHIP and PROPERTY and THINGS and WEALTH and YEARNING)

Ashe continued: “Now and then, I have wondered whether my reputation matters too much to me; but I can no more easily renounce my concern with what other people think of me than I can will myself to stop breathing. No matter what I do, or where or when I do it, I feel the eyes of others on me, judging me.”

Bonhoeffer continued: “Anxiety creates its own treasures, and they in turn beget further care. When we seek for security in possessions, we are trying to drive out care with care, and the net result is the precise opposite of our anticipations. The fetters that bind us to our possessions prove to be the cares themselves.”

Bonhoeffer continued: “For the heart that is fixed on possessions, they come with a suffocating burden of worry.”

Chapin continued: “How many men of this sort you see stumbling along in life like a camel with his load! In fact you do not see the man himself—only the pack of his possessions on his back. He finds it hard work to squeeze through the needle’s eye; and when he dies he is hardly missed; for that by which he was known—that of which he was the slave, and not the master—remains behind.”

QUOTE NOTE: Heimel was referring to materialism among shallow people. She introduced the thought by writing: “Things make yuppies feel better, more secure. Who cares about nuclear proliferation if we’ve just bought a new Cuisinart attachment? And isn’t shopping a lot safer than Valium?”

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, Jarvis is a white South African who serves as something of a spokesperson for Paton (he’s been raised in comfortable, even sheltered, White neighborhood, and only begins to question the racist underpinnings of South African society when he matures spiritually and religiously (he expresses his views in his “Private Essay on the Evolution of a South African”). In the essay, Jarvis continues: “It might have been permissible in the early days of our country, before we became aware of its cost, in the disintegration of native community life, in the deterioration of native family life, in poverty slums, and crime. But now that the cost is known, it os no longer permissible.”

POSSIBILITY

(see ACCOMPLISHMENT and ACHIEVEMENT and CAPABILITY and POTENTIAL)

Kierkegaard preceded the thought by writing: “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.”

POTENTIAL

(see also ACCOMPLISHMENT and ACHIEVEMENT and ASPIRATION and CAPABILITY and DREAMS and POSSIBILITY and UNDERACHIEVEMENT)

QUOTE NOTE: Elaine, an artist, is having lunch with former husband Jon, a filmmaker. They are middle-aged and successful, but success for both has been won by selling out on some early dreams. Here’s the full passage containing the shelf-life metaphor, which comes during a lull in their conversation: “We are silent, considering shortfalls. There’s not much time left, for us to become what we once intended. Jon had potential, but it’s not a word that can be used comfortably any more. Potential has a shelf-life.”

Fromm went on to add: “One can judge objectively to what extent a person has succeeded in his task, to what degree he has realized his potentialities. If he has failed in his task, one can recognize this failure and judge it for what it is—a moral failure.”

Hall continued: “Whether the anger is turned inward on the self, or outward towards others, dreadful destruction results.”

James added: “Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.”

Kierkegaard continued: “Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!”

May continued: “And in the same way if a man does not fulfill his potentialities as a person, he becomes to that extent constricted and ill. This is the essence of neurosis—the person’s unused potentialities…turn inward and cause morbidity.”

Miller continued: “It is the process of growth which is painful, but unavoidable. We either grow or we die, and to die while alive is a thousand times worse than to ‘shuffle off this mortal coil.’”

President Obama introduced the thought by saying: “Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself.”

QUOTE NOTE: The strip was later reprinted in Life is Like a Ten-Speed Bicycle, a 1998 book devoted exclusively to Linus’s philosophical reflections. To see the original cartoon, go to: 1981 Peanuts Cartoon.

POVERTY & THE POOR

(see also CLASS and HOMELESSNESS and HUNGER and MONEY and PROSPERITY and THE RICH & THE POOR and WELFARE and WEALTH)

QUOTE NOTE: A very similar saying is widely attributed to the American social justice advocate Dorothy Day. It’s possible that Day said something similar, but no specific source information has ever been provided. Father Câmara, a Brazilian priest who rose to the position of archbishop in his country, is the original author of the sentiment. His remark has also been translated this way: “When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.”

Day began by writing: “We need always to be thinking and writing about poverty, for if we are not among its victims its reality fades from us.”

Hurston added: “Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rotting around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all Internet sites mistakenly present the quotation as if it ended with the phrase “among the ranks of the disadvantaged.”

POWER

(see also AUTHORITY and CORRUPTION and INFLUENCE and OPPRESSION and POLITICIANS and POLITICS and POWERLESSNESS and STRENGTH and TYRANNY)

QUOTE NOTE: The biblical aphorism, of course, is from 1 Timothy 6:10: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Abbey continued: “And power attracts the worst and corrupts the best among men.”

* Truth is always the enemy of power. And power the enemy of truth. Edward Abbey, in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989)

Mrs. Adams, an important political advisor to her husband, preceded the thought by writing: “I am more and more convinced that man is a dangerous creature.”

Adam’s description of the effects continued in a memorable way: “A diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.”

QUOTE NOTE: This passage is regarded as the origin of the popular expression knowledge is power. In Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques (1876), the French writer Ernest Renan wrote: “‘Knowledge is power’ is the finest idea ever put into words.”

Bacon continued: “The desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall; but in charity there is no excess: neither can angel or man come into danger by it.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: A original source for this quotation, which became popular after Auden and Kronenberger selected it for their anthology, has never been provided.

In the dream, Franklin continued: “When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the quotation is typically presented. The full passage was: “Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and who have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though for but one year, can never willingly abandon it.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly attribute this observation to Margaret Thatcher (see her entry above).

QUOTE NOTE: Lord Acton continued: “Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Lord Action’s dictum, as it is called, may be history’s most famous observation on the subject of power, but it’s not the first one on the power corrupts theme (see the William Pitt entry below). The full text of Acton’s letter may be seen at Lord Acton 1887 Letter.

Regarding Acton’s legendary saying, my friend John Hudson recently told me an engaging story about the long-serving Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau. In an appearance on the CBC-Radio program “As It Happens,” interviewer Barbara Frum (mother of political analyst David Frum), asked Drapeau for his opinion about Lord Acton’s famous dictum. He replied: “It’s true Barbara, but it’s not absolutely true!”

Holt went on to add: “Do you think it’s likely to do much toward governing a great country, and making wise laws, and giving shelter, food, and clothes to millions of men? Ignorant power comes in the end to the same thing as wicked power; it makes misery”

Emerson added: “And this is an element with which the world is so saturated—there is no chink or crevice in which it is not lodged—that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.”

The passage continued: “Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.”

QUOTE NOTE: Ingersoll added: “It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never abused it, except upon the side of mercy.” Thanks to Dave Hill of the “Wish I Said That” website, I recently learned that Ingersoll had, in an 1877 lecture, suggested the following words as an inscription for Lincoln’s monument: “Here sleeps the only man in the history of the world, who, having been clothed with almost absolute power, never abused it, except on the side of mercy.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, Abraham Lincoln is mistakenly quoted as the author of the 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 clearly based on Ingersoll’s observation.

QUOTE NOTE: This became something of a signature line for Kissinger, a dweeb who considered himself a ladies' man (he sometimes phrased the observation: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac”). Kissinger, a great student of history, was almost certainly aware of a similar observation attributed to Napoleon by his personal valet, Louis Constant Wairy. In a remark about women, the French emperor said to his valet: “Power is what they like—it is the greatest of all aphrodisiacs.” The attribution occurred in Wairy’s memoirs, first published in Paris in 1830.

After mentioning abuses of power in Monarchies and Aristocracies, Madison went on to write: “In Republics, the great danger is that the majority may not sufficiently respect the rights of the minority.”

Nader continued: “And the definition of perfect tyranny is an institution that really has nothing to lose. And that’s the problem with a government bureaucracy—it has nothing to lose.”

QUOTE NOTE: This came in a section of the book in which Obst—the producer of such films as The Fisher King and Sleepless in Seattle—was exploring the metaphor that “Information is currency.”

A half-century earlier, in his Maxims of State (1700), Lord Halifax offered this additional thought about power and liberty: “Power and Liberty are like Heat and Moisture: where they are well mixed, everything prospers; where they are single, they are destructive.”

ERROR ALERT: This observation is widely attributed to Thatcher, but there is no evidence she ever said anything like it. The original author of the saying is Peter Carr, an American Teamster's Union official (see his entry above).

Tuchman continued: “Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office.”

PRAISE

(see also APPLAUSE and APPRECIATION and APPROVAL and COMPLIMENTS and ENCOURAGEMENT and FLATTERY and MERIT and RECOGNITION and SELF-PRAISE)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the observation is commonly presented, but it was initially offered as the concluding line of a longer passage: “For as it is said of calumny, ‘calumniate boldly, for some of it will stick’ so it may be said of ostentation (except it be in a ridiculous degree of deformity), ‘boldly sound your own praises, and some of them will stick.’” De Augmentis Scientiarum, originally written in Latin, was an expanded version of Bacon’s 1605 classic The Advancement of Learning.

QUOTATION CAUTION: This observation, now quite popular, has not been found in any of Beecher’s published works. Its inclusion in Edwards’ 1908 anthology looks like the earliest appearance of the quotation.

QUOTE NOTE: This observation was originally presented in the phonetic style favored by Billings and other humorists of the era: “Accepting praize that iz not our due iz not mutch better than tew be a receiver of stolen goods.”

Bovee preceded the thought by writing: “A lad who is often told that he is a good boy will in time grow ashamed to exhibit the qualities of a bad one. Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection.”

QUOTE NOTE: Brooks felt his admonition was especially relevant to those leadership and management positions. He preceded the thought by writing: “I beg you to think of this, you who are set in positions of superintendence and authority.”

Cioran continued: “Yet none will bring himself to confess, for it is less dishonorable to commit a crime than to announce such a pitiful and humiliating weakness arising from a sense of loneliness and insecurity, a feeling that afflicts both the fortunate, with equal intensity.”

In yet another observation from his personal writings, the Marquis wrote: “Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit.”

Ginott continued: “There are rules and cautions that govern the handling of potent medicines—rules about timing and dosage, cautions about possible allergic reactions. There are similar regulations about the administration of emotional medicine as well. The single most important rule is that praise deal only with children’s efforts and accomplishments, not with their character and personality.”

QUOTE NOTE: Haley offered this thought in a number of slightly different variations over the years, and he did it with such frequency that it became his signature saying (the earliest published version has never been found, however). The words are inscribed on Haley’s gravestone in Henning, Tennessee, and the saying became the official slogan of a U.S. Coast Guard ship in honor of Haley, who served in the USCG from 1939 to 1959. Haley’s biographer Robert J. Norrell believes the first version of the saying was “Find something good and praise it,” and that it first emerged when Haley worked for Reader’s Digest in the early 1960s.

Lair continued: “And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellows the warm sunshine of praise.”

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, Clutton is responding to protagonist Philip Carey’s request to have him evaluate one of his paintings. Clutton goes on: “Besides, what’s the good of criticism? What does it matter if your picture is good or bad?” When Carey replies, “It matters to me,” Clutton continues:

“No. The only reason that one paints is that one can’t help it. It’s a function like any of the other functions of the body, only comparatively few people have got it. One paints for oneself: otherwise one would commit suicide.”

McGinley went on to write: “As a writer it delights me to find fan notes in the morning mail even when they are addressed, as they have been on occasion, variously to Mister McGinley, Miss McGill, or Phyllis McGinkley. My ego is repaired, my disposition softened, and I grow more agreeable to my near and dear.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often misattributed to the prolific English novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the father of Robert Bulwer-Lytton.

QUOTE NOTE: In the article, Midstokke was talking about the importance of compliments, praise, acknowledgments, and other affirmations of our personal worth. Later in the column, she wrote:

“Which brings me to the importance of the pedestal. I am told they are topple-tippy things, a precarious risk to be stood upon. Once placed up there, the only place we can go is down. I disagree. We should be put on pedestals all the time, preferably for the most mundane things. I know this because my husband has healed a thousands wounds of my inner child by doing just that. He literally told me he was proud of me for taking a nap the other day. This is brilliant because I’m really good at taking naps. What I’m learning is that it is often these nearly microscopic acknowledgements, the tiny affirmations of our choices, the nods of empathy when we wrestle with our mistakes, that give us our sense of place, belonging, worth.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is a modern translation, from John Wood in 1959. Traditional translations presented the passage this way: “However gross the flattery, the most cunning are easily duped; there is nothing so impertinent or ridiculous which they will not believe, provided it be seasoned with praise.”

QUOTE NOTE: This passage has also been translated: “It is easy to flatter; it is harder to praise.”

QUOTE NOTE: Ambergris is no longer a familiar word, but it was widely known in the eighteenth century when it was highly prized by perfumers as a fixative in the preparation of perfumes. This is the sense of the word in Pope’s observation. For more on the nature of ambergris—a super-expensive product which originates in the dung of sperm whales—see this wonderful excerpt from Christopher Kemp’s 2012 book on the subject: Floating Gold.

Stowe added: “Blame and rebuke are rain and hail; they beat down and bedraggle, even though they may at times be necessary.”

PRANKS

(see also JESTS & JESTING and JOKES & JOKING and HUMOR & HUMORISTS and HUMOR—SENSE OF and LAUGHTER and SPOOF and TOMFOOLERY and TRICK and WIT)

PRAYER

(see also GOD and KNEELING and MEDITATION and RELIGION and SPIRITUALITY and WISH and WORSHIP)

QUOTE NOTE: Angelou wrote this to Oprah Winfrey on her 50th birthday.

Auden continued: “Whenever a man so concentrates his attention—on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the true God—that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.”

Bellow continued: “I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly presented as: “A prayer, in its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned heavenward.” This slightly altered version appeared in a popular 1886 quotation anthology (Edge-Tools of Speech by Maturin M. Ballou), and the error has been perpetuated to the present day.

Ijada continued: “They betrayed my father, who had served Them loyally all his life. They betrayed my mother, or They were powerless to save her, which was as bad or worse. If a god has come to me, He certainly hasn’t come for me!”

ERROR ALERT: This is the way the saying was originally phrased, but almost all internet sites and many published quotation anthologies now present a modernized version of the thought: “In prayer, it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.”

In that same routine, Carlin said: “I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.”

Note the lovely chiastic reversal in the middle of the observation. In her book, Chittister also wrote on the subject:

“A spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeat. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer sustains us on the way.”

QUOTE NOTE: The poem also contains this related couplet: “He prayeth well who loveth well/Both man and bird and beast.”

Doherty continued: “It begins with vocal prayer, the one all of us are so familiar with. It goes on to mental prayer and meditation, a prayer that all too many people are unfamiliar with. This ‘lifting’ also includes the prayer of silence, the prayer of the heart, contemplative prayer, unknown to still more people.”

Her book also contained these other observations on the subject:

“The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God.”

“True prayer is not asking God for love; it is learning to love, and to include all mankind in one affection.”

In the piece, Gandhi continued: “I am not a man of learning, but I humbly claim to be a man of prayer. I am indifferent as to the form. Every one is a law unto himself in that respect. But there are some well-marked roads, and it is safe to walk along the beaten tracks, trod by the ancient teachers. Well, I have given my personal testimony. Let every one try and find that as a result of daily prayer, he adds some thing new to his life, something which nothing can be compared.”

ERROR ALERT: On hundreds of internet sites, this beautiful sentiment is mistakenly attributed to the writer Doris Lessing, usually in the following phrasing: “A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.”

QUOTE NOTE: Morrow’s essay was about how reading and other forms of thoughtful contemplation can help people through tough times. He concluded the essay this way: “The contemplation of anything intelligent—it need not be writing—helps the mind through the black hours. Mozart, for example; music like bright ice water, or say, the memory of the serene Palladian lines of Jefferson’s Monticello. These things realign the mind and teach it not to be petty. All honest thought is a form of prayer.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly attribute this quotation to Thomas Merton.

In that same work, ten Boom also wrote on the subject: “To pray only when in peril is to use safety belts only in heavy traffic.”

ERROR ALERT: Capote told Steinem that this quotation was the inspiration for a novel he was writing, tentatively titled Answered Prayers. The quotation has never been found in St. Teresa’s writings.

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the quotation appears in almost all quotation anthologies, but Sir Robert's fuller words in the play went like this: “In all things connected with money I have had a luck so extraordinary that sometimes it has made me almost afraid. I remember having read somewhere in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.”

[School] PRAYER

(see also CHURCH & STATE and KNEELING and MEDITATION and POLITICS & RELIGION and PRAYER and RELIGION and WORSHIP)

PREACHERS & PREACHING

(see also CLERGY and ELOQUENCE and ORATION & ORATORY and RELIGION and SERMONS and SPEECHES & SPEECHMAKING)

QUOTE NOTE: The observation comes in a description of Rev. Joseph Bellamy Stoker, a mesmerizing orator. The narrator preceded the thought by writing: “He delighted in the reflex stimulus of the excitement he produced in others by working on their feelings.”

PRECEDENT

(see also JUDGES and LAWS & LEGISLATION and LAWYERS and PRINCIPLE and TRADITION)

Cardozo went on to write: “That court best serves the law which recognizes that the rules of law which grew up in a remote generation may, in the fullness of experience, be found to serve another generation badly, and which discards the old rule when it finds that another rule of law represents what should be.”

Disraeli added: “The principle may be right or may be wrong—that is a question for discussion; but at the first glance it is right to conclude that it is a principle that has been acted upon and recognized by those who preceded it.”

QUOTE NOTE: Disraeli was a member of the opposition when he said this in a speech critical of recent monetary policy decisions made by the British government. The government, according to Disraeli, had been selectively defending their decisions, sometimes appealing to precedent and at other times arguing for their discarding.

ERROR ALERT: Some respected quotation anthologies attribute the saying “A precedent embalms a principle” to William Scott (the 1st Baron Stowell) and say he was being quoted by Disraeli in the 1848 speech. I’ve examined the text of the speech, and Disraeli makes no mention of Lord Stowell. He clearly appears to be offering the thoughts as his own.

PRECOCITY

(includes PRECOCIOUS and PRECOCIOUSNESS; see also CHILDHOOD and GENIUS and PRODIGY and TALENT)

Fuller continued: “Nature intended the years of childhood to be spent in perceiving and playing, not in reflecting and acting; and when her processes are hurried or disturbed, she is sure to exact a penalty.”

PRECONCEPTIONS

(see also BIAS and EXPECTATIONS and SELF-DECEPTION and PREJUDICE)

PREFACE

(see also BOOKS and PLAYS and PROLOGUE)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation did not appear in any of the earlier editions of the book. D’Israeli went on to write: “A good preface is as essential to pat the reader into a good humor, as a good prologue is to a play, to sooth the auditors into candor, and even into partiality. The Italians call the preface La salsa del libro, the sauce of the book.”

ERROR ALERT: D’israeli’s observation is often mistakenly presented as: “A preface, being the entrance of a book, should invite by its beauty. An elegant porch announces the splendor of the interior.”

PREGNANCY

(see also BABIES and CHILDBIRTH and FAMILIES and INFANTS and MARRIAGE)

PREJUDICE

(see also BIAS and BIGOTRY and DISCRIMINATION and HATE & HATRED and RACISM and SEXISM and STEREOTYPES & STEREOTYPING and TOLERANCE and XENOPHOBIA)

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this sentiment is mistakenly attributed to E. B. White

See the related thought by Mark Twain below.

ERROR ALERT: After appearing in Fadiman’s book, this quotation became quite popular, but it has never been found in any of James’s writings or speeches. Clare Booth Luce is, in fact, the original author of the sentiment. In an April, 1946 issue of Today’s Woman magazine, she wrote: “What generally passes for ‘thought’ among the majority of mankind is the time one takes out to rearrange one’s prejudices.”

ERROR ALERT: For many years, a very similar quotation has been attributed to William James: “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” Clifton Fadiman attributed this saying to James in his 1955 book, The American Treasury, 1455–1955. Nothing like it has ever been found in James’s writings or speeches, though, and it now appears that Fadiman simply got this one wrong.

Twain continued: “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

[Racial] PREJUDICE

(see RACISM & RACIAL PREJUDICE)

PREPARATION

(includes PREPAREDNESS; see also PLANS & PLANNING and READINESS)

QUOTE NOTE: According to The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012), this is the earliest appearance in print of a sentiment that evolved into the modern proverb “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” The saying has been attributed to many people—including Darryl Royal, Oprah Winfrey—but all who have advanced the idea were borrowing from the 1912 saying above.

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is not original to Dentinger; she was only putting an established saying into the mouth of one of her fictional characters. In the book, narrator and protagonist Jocelyn O’Roarke puts it this way: “Well, my friend, Ruth, who's a great opponent of what she calls ‘magic thinking,’ says luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

QUOTE NOTE: While the phrase unspectacular preparation had been used before, this appears to be the earliest appearance of a quotable sentiment that went on to be borrowed by Robert Schuller, Harvey Mackay, and others. Dr. McFarland, the Topeka, Kansas superintendent of schools, offered the observation in a speech at an annual meeting of teachers in Macon County, Illinois, on Oct. 12, 1944.

QUOTE NOTE: Mumford continued in a fascinating way. It’s a bit longer than most of the quotations featured here, but the metaphor is so beautiful I think you will appreciate it:

“In life, we must begin to give a public performance before we have acquired even a novice’s skill; and often our moments of seeming mastery are upset by new demands, for which we have acquired no preparatory facility. Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments; even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one of endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair.”

QUOTE NOTE: Several decades ago, it was common to see Royal described as the author of this saying, but the original idea first appeared in print an 1912 (see the Author Unknown entry above). Royal was one of America’s most successful college football coaches, most famously with the University of Texas (1957–76). In a coaching career that spanned twenty-two years, he won three national championships and never had a losing season.

QUOTE NOTE: According to the Dictionary of Modern Proverbs (2012), this is the earliest appearance of a sentiment that has evolved into a modern proverb. The saying has been attributed to many legendary figures, including Benjamin Franklin, but the original author appears to be Williams, a virtually unknown American Protestant minister. You’ll also see several other variations on the theme in this section. For a fuller discussion, seethis post from Garson O’Toole, better known as The Quote Investigator.

QUOTE NOTE: The opportunity meets preparation phrase was already well established when Ziglar wrote these words. For more, go to Luck.

PRESENT (as in TIME)

(includes PRESENT MOMENT; see also AWARENESS and FUTURE and HISTORY and MEMORY and NOSTALGIA and NOW and PAST and PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE and REMEMBRANCE and TIME and TODAY and TRADITION)

A moment later in the book, Arendt further explained: “The Now is what measures time backwards and forwards, because the Now, strictly speaking, is not time but outside time. In the Now, past and future meet.”

Buechner preceded the thought by writing: “The point is to see it for what it is, because it will be gone before you know it. If you waste it, it is your life that you’re wasting. If you look the other way, it may be the moment you’ve been waiting for always that you’re missing.”

ERROR ALERT: On most internet sites, the observation is mistakenly presented as if it were written: “What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.”

QUOTE NOTE: This historic speech, delivered at Riverside Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was Dr. King’s first major speech in opposition to the Vietnam War.

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly presented as if it read that we might be alive.

QUOTE NOTE: This was Lawrence’s way of describing the importance of living fully in the present moment. He began by writing: “For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time.”

Tolle continued: “Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.”

ERROR ALERT: This saying is sometimes attributed to John Updike, who offered the same expression in his Introduction to the 1977 edition of The Poorhouse Fair (1958)

QUOTE NOTE: This is a lovely metaphorical observation, relating the lives of human being to an insect trapped in amber, and thus forever preserved in time.

Thoreau went on to add: “Fools stand on their island [of] opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this.”

QUOTE NOTE: I believe Whittier’s “now and here” phrasing is the likely progenitor of all later sayings about living in the “here and now.”

PRESENT MOMENT

(seePRESENT)

PRESIDENTS & THE PRESIDENCY

(see also CONGRESS and GOVERNMENT & GOVERNING and IMPEACHMENT and LEADERS and LEADERSHIP and POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS and POLITICAL PARTIES and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICS & POLITICIANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and POLITICS & RELIGION and PRESIDENTS—ON THEMSELVES & THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY and STATESMEN/STATEWOMEN and VICE-PRESIDENTS & THE VICE-PRESIDENCY and WASHINGTON, D.C.)

Adams continued: “He must sooner or later be convinced that a perpetual calm is as little to his purpose as a perpetual hurricane, and that without headway the ship can arrive nowhere.”

QUOTE NOTE: Many people think this analogy is about the attempt of House Republicans to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998, but it came in 1974 in response to calls from House Democrats to impeach Richard Nixon over the Watergate scandal.

Bellow preceded the thought by writing: “Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos.”

ERROR ALERT: A number of books mistakenly present the observation as if it began The office of the President is such a bastardizing thing.

Cooke added: “The people are well cured by then of election fever, during which they think they are choosing Moses. In the third year, they look on the man as a sinner and a bumbler and begin to poke around for rumors of another Messiah.”

Doctorow continued: “He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that governs our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into, and get us into, is his characteristic trouble. Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. One four-year-term may find us at reasonable peace with one another, working things out, and the next, trampling on each other for our scraps of bread.”

QUOTE NOTE: Vice-President Humphrey may have been inspired by a similar observation from former President Truman, offered in a speech at Columbia University (April 27, 1959): “The President is the representative of the whole nation and he’s the only lobbyist that all of the 160 million people in this country have.”

QUOTE NOTE: Laski, a British historian and Labour Party leader, viewed the American presidency as something unique in history, writing “there is no comparable foreign institution.” Later in his book, he wrote: “In England, we blame an anonymous entity ‘the Government’ if things go wrong, or a mistake is made; in the United States it is the president who is blamed.”

ERROR ALERT: This observation has been faithfully and accurately reported for many years, but after the 2016 election of Donald J. Trump as U. S. President, an erroneous version began to show up in internet postings all around the world. Almost all of the incorrect versions change the final portion of Mencken’s observation to read will be adorned by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron. Given the lightning speed with which errors get repeated on the internet, this mistaken version will likely supplant the correct original observation in the popular mind.

QUOTE NOTE: Morley, a Republican congresswoman from Illinois (1981-91) succeeded Elizabeth Dole as Secretary of Labor in the George H. W. Bush administration.

Polk continued: “While he executes the laws with an impartial hand, shrinks from no proper responsibility, and faithfully carries out in the executive department of the Government the principles and policy of those who have chosen him, he should not be unmindful that our fellow-citizens who have differed with him in opinion are entitled to the full and free exercise of their opinions and judgments, and that the rights of all are entitled to respect and regard.”

QUOTE NOTE: Roosevelt said this in a speech shortly before his first presidential election victory. He continued: “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

QUOTE NOTE: Roosevelt was only forty-two when he assumed the Presidency in 1901, so it was not surprising that he would remain politically active after leaving the office in 1909. In addition to his many speeches and addresses, he also became a regular guest columnist for The Kansas City Star (owned by his close friend William Rockhill Nelson). In the closing years of WWI, Roosevelt was deeply concerned about what he regarded as President Woodrow Wilson’s reluctance to quickly and fully engage in wartime efforts against Germany. Challenging the view that the nation should rally around a President simply because he is the President, Roosevelt preceded the thought above by writing: “The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile.”

Roosevelt continued: “Once he has left office he cannot do very much; and he is a fool if he fails to realize it all and to be profoundly thankful for having had the great chance.”

Steinbeck continued: “We subject him and his family to close and constant scrutiny and denounce them for things that we ourselves do every day. A Presidential slip of the tongue, a slight error in judgment—social, political, or ethical—can raise a storm of protest. We give the President more work than a man can do, more responsibility than a man should take, more pressure than a man can bear. We abuse him often and rarely praise him. We wear him out, use him up, eat him up. And with all this, Americans have a love for the President that goes beyond loyalty or party nationality; he is ours, and we exercise the right to destroy him.”

Truman, who ascended to the Presidency after the sudden death of FDR at age 63 on April 12, 1945, continued: “The fantastically crowded nine months of 1945 taught me that a President either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt I could let up for a single moment.” NOTE: I hope you caught the nice example of chiasmus in the penultimate sentence.

Polk continued: “Still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.”

Will was talking about Gerald Ford, who he described as “the most inarticulate President since the invention of broadcasting.” Will introduced the thought by writing: “Rhetorical skills are not peripheral to the political enterprise, and they are among the most important skills a person can bring to the Presidency.” His essay also included a memorable metaphor that many regard as appropriate in the current era: “An inarticulate President is like a motorcycle motor installed in a Mack truck.”

PRESIDENTS—ON THEMSELVES & THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENCY

(see also CONGRESS and GOVERNMENT & GOVERNING and IMPEACHMENT and LEADERS and LEADERSHIP and POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS and POLITICAL PARTIES and POLITICAL SLOGANS and POLITICS & POLITICIANS and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBING THEMSELVES and POLITICIANS—DESCRIBED BY OTHERS and POLITICS & BUSINESS and POLITICS & RELIGION and STATESMEN/STATEWOMEN and PRESIDENTS & THE PRESIDENCY and VICE-PRESIDENTS & THE VICE-PRESIDENCY and WASHINGTON, D.C.)

QUOTE NOTE: FDR said this in a speech shortly before winning his first presidential election. A bit later, he went on to add: “That’s what the office is—a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying to new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct to which we always go back. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are all bogged up or lose our way.”

[The] PRESS

(see also FREEDOM OF THE PRESS and JOURNALISM and MEDIA and NEWS and NEWSPAPERS and REPORTERS & REPORTING)

QUOTE NOTE: In the centuries before Cooper offered this thought, fire had been described as a bad master a cruel master and even a fearful master, but this 1838 essay looks like the earliest appearance in print of the phrase terrible master (see the FIRE section for those quotations). See also the MONEY section, where P. T. Barnum applied the phrase to money.

PRETENDING & PRETENDERS

(see also AFFECTATION and AUTHENTICITY and CONCEIT and EXAGGERATION and EXTRAVAGANCE and GRANDIOSITY and NARCISSISM and POMPOSITY & POMPOUSNESS and PRETENSION & PRETENTIOUSNESS)

Lawson went on to add: “You are defined not by life’s imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them.”

QUOTE NOTE: The words come from the protagonist Anna Wulf, who is describing one of the great themes in her life as a writer and a woman. Later in the novel, she returns to the same topic, reflecting: “There’s only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation is usually presented, but it was originally part of this larger observation (the opening paragraph of the Introduction): “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. I don’t think its a marvelous moral; I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

PRETENSION & PRETENTIOUSNESS

(see also AFFECTATION and AUTHENTICITY and CONCEIT and EXAGGERATION and EXTRAVAGANCE and GRANDIOSITY and NARCISSISM and POMPOSITY & POMPOUSNESS and PRETENDING & PRETENDERS)

QUOTE NOTE: This observation came as Kushner explained his motivation for writing his 1991 hit play Angels in America. Here’s the fuller quotation: “I wanted to attempt something of ambition and size even if that meant I might be accused of straying too close to ambition’s ugly twin, pretentiousness.”

PRETTINESS

(see also BEAUTY and CHARM and GRACE and UGLINESS)

McKean, who is best known as an American lexicographer and founder of Wordnik.com, is also something of a walking oxymoron: a fashion aficionado with feminist leanings. She preceded the foregoing thought by writing: “Now, this may seem strange from someone who writes about pretty dresses (mostly) every day, but: You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general.” McKean’s piece, which contained other memorable metaphorical reflections on the subject, may be seen in full at McKean on Prettiness.

PREVENTION

(see also CURES & CURATIVES and HEALTH and FITNESS and ILLNESS and LONGEVITY and MEDICINE)

ERROR ALERT: Many respected reference works date the origin of this American proverb as much later, some to 1795. Franklin’s letter to Johnson, however, suggests that it was already familiar by the middle of the century (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations traces a forerunner saying—prevention is better than cure—to the early seventeenth century). Some works have also mistakenly reported that Franklin offered the observation to the English man of letters, Dr. Samuel Johnson. In fact, he was writing to a similarly named Connecticut clergyman who went on to become president of King’s College, later Columbia College. Franklin’s full letter may be seen at: Ounce of Prevention.

PRICE

(see also BARGAINS and COST and MONEY and VALUE)

QUOTE NOTE: This is a beautiful sentiment, but it is not completely original. Ueland might have been inspired by an earlier observation by Mary Ridpath-Mann, to be seen below.

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to be the first appearance of a sentiment that evolved into a modern proverb. In a 2001 memorial service to honor British victims of the 9/11 World Trade Center terrorist attack, Queen Elizabeth said: “Grief is the price we pay for love.”

PRIDE

(includes PROUD and PROUDNESS; see also CONCEIT and EGOTISM and HUMILITY and MODESTY and VANITY and VANITY & PRIDE and VICE)

QUOTE NOTE: Beethoven was replying to a young aspiring pianist named Emilie, who had recently sent him a fan letter and a hand-embroidered gift. He preceded the thought above by writing: “Do not only practice art, but get at the very heart of it; this it deserves, for only art and science raise men to the God-head.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the portion of the couplet that is routinely presented these days, but it formally ended this way: “As blind men use to bear their noses higher/Than those that have their eyes and sight entire.”

Shain preceded the thought by writing: “It can be much harder to be on the receiving end of a transaction than to be the one who gets to give. In fact, being given to can mean being taken from.”

PRIDE & VANITY

(see VANITY & PRIDE)

PRIESTS & PRIESTESSES

(see also CATHOLICISM & THE CATHOLIC CHURCH and CELIBACY and MONKS and RABBIS and RELIGION and SHAMANS and THEOLOGY)

PRIMA DONNAS

(see also ACTORS & ACTRESSES and CINEMA & FILM and EGO and OPERA and STAGE and STARS & STARDOM and THEATER)

QUOTE NOTE: Dyson offered this thought in an observation in which he contrasted scientists and engineers. He preceded the thought by writing: “A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.”

Forster continued: “The beauty who does not look surprised, who accepts her position as her due-she reminds us too much of a prima donna.”

PRIMARY ELECTIONS

(see ELECTIONS)

PRIME

(see also BEST and FLOWERING and HEYDAY and HEIGHT and MATURITY and PEAK and ZENITH)

PRINCES & PRINCESSES

(see also KINGS and QUEENS and ROYALTY)

PRINCIPLES

(see also CHARACTER and CONVICTIONS and INTEGRITY and PURPOSE)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites attribute this observation to Thomas Jefferson, but there is no evidence he ever said anything like it. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation includes the saying in a section of “Spurious Quotations” on its official website.

Bickel introduced the thought by writing: “No society, certainly not a large and heterogeneous one, can fail in time to explode if it is deprived of the arts of compromise, if it knows no way of muddling through.”

PRISONS & PRISONERS

(see INCARCERATION & IMPRISONMENT)

PRIVACY

(see also [Right of] PRIVACY and SPYING and SURVEILLANCE)

McGinley added: “Every age has seen it so. The poor might have to huddle together in cities for need’s sake, and the frontiersman cling to his neighbors for the sake of protection. But in each civilization, as it advanced, those who could afford it chose the luxury of a withdrawing-place.”

[Right of] PRIVACY

(see also PRIVACY and SPYING and SURVEILLANCE)

PRIVILEGE & THE PRIVILEGED

(see also ADVANTAGE and BENEFIT and BIRTHRIGHT and CLASS and ENTITLEMENT and MEANS and PERKS & PERQUISITES and [Male] Privilege and [White] PRIVILEGE and RIGHTS and UNDERPRIVILEGED)

Buck continued: “Privilege is a serious misfortune anywhere, and the more serious because American women do not realize that the privilege they boast is really their handicap and not their blessing.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented, but it came in a larger set of remarks Egremont made to the title character. Here’s the complete passage: “I was told,” continued Egremont, “that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of mutual comprehension.” Egremont rejects all of this, he says, in an attempt to explain himself and his beliefs to Sybil.

Eisenhower preceded this thought by saying: “We must be willing, individually and as a Nation, to accept whatever sacrifices may be required of us.”

Miller preceded the thought by writing: “History was never written for the common man but for those in power.”

[White] PRIVILEGE

(see also ADVANTAGE and BENEFIT and BIRTHRIGHT and CLASS and ENTITLEMENT and MEANS and PERKS & PERQUISITES and [Racial] PREJUDICE and PRIVILEGE & THE PRIVILEGED and [Male] PRIVILEGE and RACE and RIGHTS)

QUOTE NOTE: McIntosh, of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College, may not have invented the concept of white privilege, but she has given us the most memorable words ever written on the subject. She preceded the observation by writing: “I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege. So I have begun in an untutored way to ask what it is like to have white privilege.”

PROBABILITY

(see also CERTAINTY and UNCERTAINTY)

PROBLEMS

(see also ADVERSITY and CRISIS and DANGER and DIFFICULTY and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and MISHAPS and OBSTACLES and PROBLEM-SOLVING and SUFFERING & SORROW and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS and TROUBLE)

Ackoff preceded the observation by writing: “The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers that have simple problems have simple minds. Problems that arise in organizations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a single part.”

QUOTE NOTE: In his 1967 work The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler brought this quotation out of obscurity when he used a slightly altered version of the saying as an epigraph to one of his chapters. While Koestler properly credited Anderson, some later quotation anthologies mistakenly credited Koestler with authorship—a mistake that continues to the present day on the many error-plagued internet quotation sites. For more, see this informative post by Garson O’Toole, the Quote Investigator.

PLAGIARISM ALERT: In A Window Over the Kitchen Sink (1981), the popular humorous writer Peg Bracken was thinking about a problem she recently faced when she wrote: “I have reflected, since then, that there is hardly a problem, no matter how complicated it is, that when looked at in the right way doesn’t become still more complicated.”

Ford continued: “A problem is a challenge to your intelligence. Problems are only problems until they are solved, and the solution confers a reward upon the solver. Instead of avoiding problems we should welcome them and through right thinking make them pay us profits.”

ERROR ALERT: All over the Internet, these words are mistakenly attributed directly to Fulghum, but he was in fact quoting something that had made a deep impression on him. In 1959, Fulghum was a recent college graduate working at The Feather River Inn in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. One night, deeply frustrated over working conditions at the Inn, Fulghum found himself complaining to the night auditor, an elderly Auschwitz survivor named Sigmund Wollman. Fulghum carried on for about twenty minutes in an emotional, profanity-laced tirade when Wollman asked him if he was finished. When the old man spoke, the first words out of his mouth were the ones quoted above (Wollman then concluded his remarks by adding dismissively, “And will not annoy people like me so much. Good night”).

Fulghum described it as a moment of enlightenment, writing, “Seldom in my life have I been hit between the eyes with truth so hard.” Over the subsequent decades, Fulghum found himself recalling the story every time he was trying to put things into a proper perspective, and in his Uh-Oh book, he wrote: “I think of this as the Wollman Test of Reality. Life is lumpy. And a lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat, and a lump in the breast are not the same lump. One should learn the difference.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: No original source for this quotation has been found. Another popular phrasing is: “We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

QUOTE NOTE: Shortly after the publication of his 1983 creativity classic A Whack on the Side of the Head, von Oech got a personal letter from Tom Hirshfield, a research physicist at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Hirshfield shared ten “Rules of Thumb” he had found helpful in his work as a physicist, including the one featured above. To see the complete list, see von Oech’s 2006 blog post, ”Tom Hirshfield’s Rules of Thumb”.

ERROR ALERT: Nearly all internet quotation sites present mistakenly-phrased versions of the second portion of this quotation, most commonly in these two forms: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong” and “There is always an easy solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

Pauling continued: “You don’t necessarily know that you will succeed if you work harder or longer.”

Peck continued: “When we desire to encourage the growth of the human spirit, we challenge and encourage the human capacity to solve problems, just as in school we deliberately set problems for our children to solve.”

QUOTE NOTE: Peck’s observation came in a discussion of Benjamin Franklin’s observation that “things that hurt, instruct.” His full observation was as follows: “It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.”

In his 2011 memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld said that Peres once made the following observation, similarly phrased, to him: “If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time.”

Warren added: “Not all of them are big, but all are significant in God’s growth process for you.”

PROBLEM-SOLVING

(see also CONFLICT-RESOLUTION and HEALING and PROBLEMS and RECOVERY & REHABILITATION and SOLUTIONS and TROUBLE)

Ford preceded the observation by writing: “Most people will spend more time and energy in going around problems than in trying to solve them.”

ERROR ALERT: This is one of Maslow’s most famous observations, offered in slightly different ways in his various writings. None of his works, though, contain the phrase every problem as a nail, which appears all over the internet as well as in many published books.

Warren added: “Not all of them are big, but all are significant in God’s growth process for you.”

PROCRASTINATION

(includes PUTTING THINGS OFF; see also DELAY and HESITATION and INDECISION and LAZINESS)

QUOTE NOTE: Billings originally expressed the thought in his distinctive, dialect style: “The greatest thief this world haz ever produced is Procrastination, and he is still at large.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites omit the word natural when presenting Kiam’s observation.

QUOTE NOTE: Kiam offered the thought in connection with his 1979 decision to purchase Remington Products shortly after his wife had given him his first electric shaver as a gift (in later television commercials, he would famously say, “I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company”). In his Going for It! book, Kiam put the complete procrastination thought in italics in the following passage: “An entrepreneur must be decisive and must also be prepared to grasp opportunity. Procrastination is opportunity's natural assassin. I wasted no time in finding out the particulars of Remington’s situation.” Thanks to Garson O’Toole for his assistance on this quotation.

QUOTE NOTE: In almost all current quotation anthologies—published as well as online—only the first portion of this couplet is presented.

PRODIGALITY & PRODIGALS

(see also CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and INGRATITUDE and PARENTS & PARENTHOOD)

PRODUCERS & PRODUCING

(see also ACTING and ACTORS & ACTRESSES and CINEMA and DIRECTORS & DIRECTING and FILM and HOLLYWOOD and STAGE and THEATER)

PROFANITY

(includes CURSING and CUSSING and SWEARING; see also OBSCENITY)

In his homage to profanity in the English language, Marriott, the deputy books editor of the newspaper, wrote, “Consider the force and versatility of ‘the f-word,’” adding a bit later: “Shouting it has been shown to reduce pain. It can be used as a verb, an adverb, a noun, an adjective, a modifier, an intensifier and an interjection. It is a valid exclamation of love, dismay, rage, astonishment, happiness, agony and grief. We are likely to hear it or to utter it at the greatest and the most tragic moments of our lives. A vulgar one-word sonnet.”

PROFESSIONS & PROFESSIONALS

(see also AMATEURS and CAREERS and TRAINING and VOCATION and WORK)

PROGRESS

(see also ADVANCE & ADVANCEMENT and CHANGE)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly say “nine-hundred and ninety-nine.”

ERROR ALERT: On virtually all web sites and in scores of books, this quotation is mistakenly presented as: “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”

Chesterton continued: “I do not say that Progress is therefore undesirable; or that the problems are therefore insoluble. I only say there will be numberless new problems to solve.”

Ehrenreich continued: “Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft.”

Emerson continued: “Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to the end, it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why you believe.”

The narrator continued: “Progress advances, it makes the great human and earthly journey towards what is heavenly and divine; it has its pauses, when it rallies the stragglers, its stopping places when it meditates, contemplating some new and splendid promised land that has suddenly appeared on the horizon.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is now more commonly presented in the following translation: “Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”

Mann continued: “All the higher instincts of our nature prophesy its approach; and the best intellects of the race are struggling to turn that prophecy into fulfillment.”

Mencken preceded the thought by writing: “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.”

In the same book Rossetti also wrote on the theme: “It is important to recognize your progress and take pride in your accomplishments. Share your achievements with others. Brag a little, and allow the recognition and support of those around you to nurture you.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation is interesting in its own right, but it has been completely overshadowed the passage’s next line: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

QUOTE NOTE: Wilcox began the poem by linking man’s discontent with God’s, writing, “The splendid discontent of God/With chaos made the world.” The full poem may be seen at: “Discontent”.

PROJECTION (Psychological)

(see also ANXIETY and DEFENSE MECHANISMS and PSYCHOANALYSIS and RATIONALIZATION and REPRESSION)

PROMISCUITY

(see also SEX and SEX & LOVE and LOVERS)

PROMISE (as in POTENTIAL)

(includes PROMISING; see also OPPORTUNITY and POSSIBILITIES)

PROMISE (as in PLEDGE)

(see also OATHS and PLEDGES and VOWS [Giving Ones's] WORD)

She continued: “Men and naughty children never make promises, especially promises to be good, without longing to break them the next minute.”

QUOTE NOTE: What had Tom promised? The narrator introduced the thought this way: “Tom joined the new order of Cadets of Temperance, being attracted by the showy character of their ‘regalia.’ He promised to abstain from smoking, chewing, and profanity as long as he remained a member.”

PROPAGANDA

(see also BRAINWASHING and DECEPTION and IDEAS and INDOCTRINATION and LIES & LYING and POLITICS and TRUTH and WAR)

Arendt continued: “The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

PROPERTY

(see also ACQUISITION and BUYING & SELLING and LAND and CAPITALISM and LANDOWNERS and MONEY and OWNERSHIP and POSSESSIONS and [Private] PROPERTY and REAL ESTATE and STANDARD OF LIVING and WEALTH)

[Private] PROPERTY

(see also ACQUISITION and BUYING & SELLING and LAND and CAPITALISM and LANDOWNERS and MONEY and OWNERSHIP and POSSESSIONS and PROPERTY and REAL ESTATE and STANDARD OF LIVING and WEALTH)

QUOTE NOTE: Von Mises was likely influenced by the earlier Rousseau quotation.

PROSE

(see also AUTHORS and BOOKS and POETRY & PROSE and STYLE and WRITERS and WRITING)

Chandler continued: “An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love. If you believe in an ideal, you don’t own it—it owns you.”

QUOTE NOTE: Hemingway, a proponent of sparse, unadorned writing, believed that the meaning and significance of a novel came not from fancy writing or frilly decoration, but rather from its deep internal structure—its architecture (see his famous “iceberg” writing analogy in Writers—on Themselves).

Orwell preceded the thought by writing: “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.”

QUOTE NOTE: Wodehouse continued: “I think the success of every novel—if it’s a novel of action—depends on the high spots. The thing to do is to say to yourself, ‘Which are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of them.”

PROSPERITY

(see also ADVERSITY and FORTUNE and LUXURY and PROSPERITY & ADVERSITY and SUCCESS and WEALTH)

PROSPERITY & ADVERSITY

(see also ADVERSITY and FORTUNE and LUXURY and PROSPERITY and SUCCESS and WEALTH)

Bradstreet was the first published poet (of either gender) in the American colonies. She wrote the book for her son Simon, writing in the dedication: “You once desired me to leave something for you in writing that you might look upon when you should see me no more.” In 1630, the teenage Bradstreet, her parents, and her new husband set sail on the ship Arbella for the New World (the captain was John Winthrop). While her husband went on to become the colony’s governor, she raised eight children and privately wrote poetry.

PROSTITUTES & PROSTITUTION

(includes CALL GIRL and STREETWALKER and WHORES; see also EROS & EROTICISM and ESCORTS and INTERCOURSE and KISSES & KISSING and LOVE and LUST and PASSION and PIMPS and PORNOGRAPHY and SEX)

QUOTE NOTE: Bordel is another word for a brothel or a bordello.

Sheehy’s book also included these other observations:

“It is a silly question to ask a prostitute why she does it…. These are the highest-paid ‘professional’ women in America.”

“Into this anonymous pit they climb—a fumbling, frightened, pathetic man and a cold, contemptuous, violated woman—prepared to exchange for twenty dollars no more than ten minutes of animal sex, untouched by a stroke of their common humanity.”

PROTEIN

(see also AMINO ACIDS and MOLECULES and NUTRIENTS)

PROTEST

(see also CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE and DISSENT and OPPOSITION and OUTRAGE and REBELLION and RESISTANCE and REVOLUTION and SILENCE [Absence of Protest])

QUOTE NOTE: In the spring of 1838, Emerson was attempting to come to grips with a powerful sense of outrage after citizens of the Cherokee Nation were forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Georgia and resettled in American Southwest land (present-day Oklahoma) that had been designated as Indian Territory. This practice—which also included the forced relocation of the Muscogee, Seminole, Chicasaw, and Choctaw nations—is commonly referred to as The Trail of Tears. About a letter of protest he sent to President Van Buren, Emerson wrote that he was fully aware that the letter was “merely a scream; but sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”

Hoffer preceded this observation with these famous words: “When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the quotation is often presented, but it is actually a single line from an Ochs poem that appeared on the back cover of the album. The full poem may be seen at: Phil Ochs poem.

QUOTATION CAUTION: This observation has become very popular, appearing on hundreds of internet sites. An original source has never been provided, however, so consider it an “attributed, but not verified” quotation.

Whitehead continued on a pessimistic note: “Then, alas, with pathetic ignorance of human psychology, it has proceeded by some educational scheme to bind humanity afresh with inert ideas of its own fashioning.”

ERROR ALERT: A very similar version of the first line is often mistakenly attributed to Abraham Lincoln. The problem appeared to originate in a July 25, 1951 speech to the Massachusetts legislature, in which General Douglas MacArthur—then under heat from President Truman—quoted Lincoln as saying: “To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” To see Wilcox’s full poem, go to ”Protest”.

PROTOCOL

(see also BREEDING and CIVILITY and COURTESY and ETIQUETTE and GRACE & GRACIOUSNESS and MANNERS and POLITENESS and RUDENESS and SENSITIVITY and TACT)

PROVERBS

(see also APHORISMS and EPIGRAMS and MAXIMS and QUOTATIONS and PLATITUDES and SAYINGS)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is one of Cervantes's most widely quoted observations, but it looks like a extremely generous translation of the passage, which historically was presented this way: “I am of the opinion, Sancho, there is no proverb but what is true, because they are all sentences drawn from experience itself, the mother of all sciences.”

A similar observation appeared in Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), and there are many who believe she should be legitimately regarded as the author of the short/long phrasing (see her entry below).

Erasmus added: “It will make far less impression on the mind if you say ‘Fleeting and brief is the life of man’ than if you quote the proverb ‘Man is but a bubble’.”

QUOTE NOTE: This was Mentu’s response to the title character, who had just said to him: “I won’t forget anything that you have ever taught me, the sayings, and the proverbs and all. They have helped me a lot.”

As young Moses was growing up, his most influential mentor was Mentu, a palace stableman whose primary method of moral instruction was to tell stories to the young prince. In the novel, the narrator said about him: “He had answers in the form of stories for nearly every question that Moses asked.”

Huxley added: “The newly arrested thief knows that honesty is the best policy with an intensity of conviction which the rest of us can never experience.”

In a striking metaphorical contrast between proverbs and aphorisms, Kanfer added about the latter: “The aphorism is a personal observation inflated into a universal truth, a private posing as a general.”

A bit earlier in the essay, Russell wrote: “The supposed wisdom of proverbs is mainly imaginary. As a rule, proverbs go in pairs which say opposite things. The opposite of ‘More haste, less speed’ is ‘A stitch in time saves nine’.”

QUOTE NOTE: Patch here is used in the sense “to mend,” making this one of history’s most succinct sayings on the soothing power of words.

ERROR ALERT: For nearly 150 years, published collections of quotations have mistakenly presented this observation with exploded rather than expended.

PROXIMITY

(see also CLOSENESS and FRIENDS & FRIENDSHIP and NEARNESS and NEIGHBORS and NEIGHBORHOOD and PROPINQUITY)

PSYCHIATRY & PSYCHIATRISTS

(see also EGO, SUPEREGO, & ID and INSANITY and MADNESS and MENTAL ILLNESS and NEUROSIS and PSYCHOANALYSIS and PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHOSIS and PSYCHOTHERAPY)

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to be the earliest appearance of this saying, which went on to become widely quoted and adapted. Lord Webb-Johnson was a respected British surgeon, personal physician to Queen Mary from 1936–53, and former president of the Royal College of Surgeons.

PSYCHOANALYSIS & PSYCHOANALYSTS

(see also EGO, SUPEREGO, & ID and INSANITY and MADNESS and MENTAL ILLNESS and NEUROSIS and PSYCHIATRY and PSYCHOLOGY and PSYCHOSIS and PSYCHOTHERAPY and UNCONSCIOUS)

ERROR ALERT: This is how the quotation almost always appears, but not one quotation anthology offers a precise citation because Chesterton never said it this way. On several occasions, he did use the confession without absolution phrase, but never in the clear-cut and direct way typically suggested. The closest he came was in an Aug. 25, 1922 piece he wrote in The New Witness: “I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution.”

De Vries continued: “I mean the traditional conflict between flesh and spirit, as viewed by the Christianity now supposedly outmoded, isn’t likely to ease up because we have scrapped the notion of sin and now speak instead of the ego and superego between them riding herd on something called the id. It’s the same keg of nails any way you open it.”

Nin went on to write: “Just as scientists stripped away the layers of matter to get at the heart of the atom, the analyst has stripped away the layers of the personality to get at the core of the psyche.”

PSYCHOBABBLE

(see BABBLE)

PSYCHOLOGY & PYSCHOLOGISTS

(see also ANTHROPOLOGY & ANTHROPOLOGISTS and COUNSELING & PSYCHOTHERAPY and INSANITY and MADNESS and MENTAL HEALTH/MENTAL ILLNESS and NEUROSIS and PSYCHOANALYSIS and PSYCHIATRY and PSYCHOSIS and SELF-HELP and SOCIAL SCIENCE and SOCIOLOGY & SOCIOLOGISTS)

PUBERTY

(see also ADOLESCENCE and TEENAGER and SEX & SEXUALITY and YOUTH)

Barry introduced the thought by writing: “I’ll tell you what would really age me fast: if I had a teenaged daughter. I don’t think I could handle that. Because that would mean teenaged boys would be coming around to my house. ‘Hi, Mr. Barry!’ they’d say, with their cheerful, innocent young voices. ‘We’re here to have sex with your daughter!’ No, of course they wouldn’t come out and say that, but I know that’s what they’d be thinking, because I was a teenaged boy once, and I was basically a walking hormone storm. I’m sure modern boys are no different.”

QUOTE NOTE: Demian is a coming of age tale that originally appeared to be a memoir written by one Emil Sinclair (a nom de plume chosen by Hesse for the work). In this remarkable description of the onset of puberty, Sinclair added: “What my curiosity sought, what dreams, lust and fear created—the great secret of puberty—did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child.” To see how the passage continues, go to Demian

PUBLIC OPINION

(includes PUBLIC SENTIMENT; see also OPINION and [Opinion] POLLS and [The] PUBLIC)

Lester continued: “Telling the truth is perhaps the pacifist’s only weapon. Over and over again, even the suggestion that one may publish the facts has changed a scornful, bullying opponent into an almost subservient helper. But how dangerous it is!”

Lincoln continued: “Consequently, he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper that he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

Struther continued: “That is why private opinion, and private behavior, and private conversation are so terrifyingly important.”

PUBLIC RELATIONS

(see also ADVERTISING and INFLUENCE and PROPAGANDA and PUBLICITY and SPIN)

PUBLIC SERVICE

(see (PUBLIC) SERVICE)

PUBLIC SPEAKING

(see SPEECHES & Live by publicity, you’ll probably die by publicity. Russell Baker, in The New York Times (Dec. 3, 1986) WII:305SPEECHMAKING)

PUBLICITY

(see also ADVERTISING and CELEBRITY and FAME and PRESS and PRESS AGENT and PROMOTION and PUBLIC RELATIONS and SELF-PROMOTION)

ERROR ALERT: This observation has been commonly misattributed to Thomas Wolfe. For more on the quotation, see this 2011 QUOTE INVESTIGATOR post.

QUOTE NOTE: Brandeis may not have been the author of the proverb sunlight is the best disinfectant, but he certainly helped popularize the saying. In offering his fuller thought above, Brandeis was likely inspired by an 1860 observation from Emerson (see below)

Jung added: “Everybody has to meet everybody, and they even seem to enjoy this enormity.”

QUOTE NOTE: According to the Yale Book of Quotations, this modern proverb was first expressed in this exact phrasing in the Washington Post on Feb. 24, 1938. Seven years earlier, a negatively-phrased version of the sentiment (“No publicity is bad publicity”) had appeared in a July 14, 1931 issue of the the Oshkosh [Wisconsin] Daily Northwestern.

PUBLISHING & PUBLISHERS

(see also AUTHOR and BEST-SELLER and BOOKSTORE and FICTION and LIBRARIES & LIBRARIANS and LITERATURE and NOVELS & NOVELISTS and READING and WRITERS and WRITING)

Atwood continued: “Or else you find out in an unpleasant way: You’re arrested, you are condemned, you are tortured, you are shot, you disappear. Those doing the shooting and the torturing, whether they are from the left or the right, whether they represent theocracies or secular totalitarian dictatorships or extreme factions, all have one thing in common: They wish to silence the human voice, or all human voices that do not sing their songs.” The full text of Atwood’s speech may be seen at The Daily Beast

PUERTO RICO

(see UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—SPECIFIC STATES)

PUGNACITY

(see also AGGRESSION & AGGRESSIVENESS and BELLICOSITY and BELLIGERENCE and TRUCULENCE)

PUNCTUATION

(includes APOSTROPHE, COMMA, PERIOD, SEMICOLON and other punctuation marks; see also GRAMMAR and PARTS OF SPEECH and PUNCTUATION METAPHORS and SPELLING and LANGUAGE USAGE)

Abbey concluded: “I’ve had to waste hours erasing that storm of flyshit on the typescript [of The Monkey Wrench Gang].” For a similar letter of complaint about an overly enthusiastic copyeditor, see the Raymond Chandler entry in GRAMMAR.

QUOTE NOTE: Wilde had a great fondness for italicization and this remark, delivered in the presence of others, was intended as a put-down. See Wilde’s reply below.

QUOTE NOTE: In Words on Words: Quotations About Language and Languages (2000), David & Hilary Crystal present a slightly different translation: “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a full stop put just at the right place.” In American English, the term full stop is rarely used, but in England, it is used interchangeably with period to indicate the end of a sentence (an example occurs in the Lynne Truss entry below). For more on the subject, go to: Full Stops.

Baker preceded the thought by writing: “When speaking aloud, you punctuate constantly—with body language. Your listener hears commas, dashes, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks as you shout, whisper, pause, wave your arms, roll your eyes, wrinkle your brow.” Baker’s informative article also included these other tips and suggestions:

“The dash creates a dramatic pause to prepare for an expression needing strong emphasis.”

“Parentheses help you pause quietly to drop in some chatty information not vital to your story.”

“A colon is a tip-off to get ready for what’s next: a list, a long quotation, or an explanation.”

“You can also end [a sentence] with an exclamation point (!), but must you? Usually it just makes you sound breathless and silly.”

QUOTE NOTE: In an observation that was clearly inspired by this Fitzgerald quotation, British humorist Miles Kington offered the following in a 1976 issue of the English humor magazine Punch: “So far as good writing goes, the use of the exclamation mark is a sign of failure. It is the literary equivalent of a man holding up a card reading LAUGHTER to a studio audience.”

ERROR ALERT: On many internet sites, the Fitzgerald quotation is mistakenly presented as: “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own joke.” This error appears to have originated with Jon Winokur, who presented it this way in his otherwise wonderful quotation anthology, Advice to Writers (1999)

QUOTE NOTE: Gass was describing Bishop’s penchant for using dashes, and how her many dashes were changed into oh-so-many commas by editors at The New Yorker. He continued: “Not to mention those comma-like curvatures that function like overhead lighting—apostrophes they’re called—that warn of a bad crack in a spelt word where some letters have disappeared to apparently no one’s alarm; or claws that admit the words they enclose aren’t theirs; or those that issue claims of ownership, called possessives by unmarried teachers.”

Hemingway added: “You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”

Lederer and Dowis added: “They tell when to slow down, when to stop, and what to expect along the way. Reading a book with no punctuation would be like driving through a busy city with no signs or signals.” In her 2003 grammar guide Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss was likely thinking of this quotation when she wrote: “Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.”

Menand found so many punctuation mistakes, grammatical errors, and questionable recommendations in Truss’s book that he wrote: “It’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.” To read Menand’s full article, go to: "Bad Comma".

Miller ended his metaphorical flight of fancy in, for him, a predictable way: “Wow! Think I got my ass kicked much in high school?”

Nordquist, professor of rhetoric and English at Armstrong Atlantic State University (Savannah, GA) and the Grammar Guide for About.com, added: “Favored by advertisers, preteens, and writers of ransom notes, the exclamation point is less a mark of punctuation than an oratorical cue or a typographical shriek—in newspaper slang, a ‘screamer.’” To read the full post, go to: Nordquist on Exclamation Points.

Stein, who famously eschewed the use of commas in her writing, also had this to say on the subject in that same lecture: “A comma by helping you along holding your coat for you and putting on your shoes keeps you from living your life as actively as you should lead it and to me for many years…the use of them was positively degrading.”

Truss continued: “The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.”

Truss’s book was filled with extended metaphorical flourishes. Here are two more examples:

“As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved, incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it’s like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in the bath during the interval. It’s just not cricket.”

“Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP for hours if necessary . . . and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots . . . you stop. But the thermals that benignly waft our sentences to new altitudes—that allow us to coast on air, and loop-the-loop, suspending the laws of gravity—well, they are the colons and semicolons.”

White made the observation as he was denying that there was such a thing as “a New Yorker style.” He did, however, make this slight concession: “If sometimes there seems to be a sort of sameness of sound in The New Yorker, it probably can be traced to the magazine’s copydesk, which is a marvelous fortress of grammatical exactitude and stylish convention.”

QUOTE NOTE: This was Wilde’s rejoinder to Asquith’s attempt to put him down for using italics in his writing (see the Asquith remark above).

Zinsser added: “We have all suffered more than our share of these sentences in which an exclamation point knocks us over the head with how cute or wonderful something was.” Zinsser also offered these thoughts on other punctuation marks:

“The Semicolon. There is a 19th-century mustiness that hangs over the semicolon…. The semicolon brings the reader, if not to a halt, at least to a pause. So use it with discretion, remembering that it will slow to a Victorian pace the late-20th-century momentum you’re striving for, and rely instead on the period and the dash.”

“The Dash. Somehow this invaluable tool is widely regarded as not quite proper—a bumpkin at the genteel dinner table of good English. But it has full membership and will get you out of many tight corners.”

“The Period. There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”

PUNCTUATION METAPHORS

(see also GRAMMAR and PARTS OF SPEECH and PUNCTUATION and SPELLING and LANGUAGE USAGE)

(see also ANIMAL METAPHORS and BASEBALL METAPHORS and BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING METAPHORS and DARKNESS METAPHORS and DISEASE METAPHORS and FRUIT METAPHORS and GARDENING METAPHORS and HEART METAPHORS and JOURNEY METAPHORS and PARTS OF SPEECH METAPHORS and PATH METAPHORS and PLANT METAPHORS and PUNCTUATION METAPHORS and RETAIL/WHOLESALE METAPHORS and ROAD METAPHORS and NAUTICAL METAPHORS and VEGETABLE METAPHORS)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This quotation appears on the web sites of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of churches, and it even became the centerpiece of a 2005 national advertising campaign by the United Church of Christ (“God is Still Speaking”). The quotation has never been authenticated, however. It is commonly reported that Allen addressed the saying to husband George Burns in a letter she wrote to him just before her death. The story is almost certainly false—and, as often happens with apocryphal stories, it is often embellished with tantalizing details (the most popular is that Burns discovered the long-lost letter in his deceased wife’s papers many years after her death).

AUTHOR NOTE: Long before Cher and Madonna, a French woman with a single name was the world’s most famous female entertainer. Mistinguett (pronounced miss-tin-GET) was a singer and dancer who rose from poverty to become the highest-paid female entertainer of her time.

PUNISHMENT

(see also [Capital] PUNISHMENT and [Corporal] PUNISHMENT and CRIME and DISCIPLINE and GUILT and JUSTICE and LAW and RETRIBUTION)

[Capital] PUNISHMENT

(see CAPITAL PUNISHMENT)

[Corporal] PUNISHMENT

(includes SPANKING; see also CRUELTY and DISCIPLINE and CHILDREN and FAMILIES and PARENTING & PARENTHOOD)

PUNS

(see also WORDPLAY)

Barry continued: “When in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.”

QUOTE NOTE: Boswell might have been thinking about the subject of his famous biography when writing this, for Dr. Johnson was fond of punning. Boswell introduced the observation by writing: “For my own part I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the origin of the popular expression A pun is the lowest form of wit. “Defence of the Epilogue” originally appeared as an appendix to The Conquest of Granada, a stage play written completely in iambic pentameter and first performed in 1670. Dryden never used the word pun though, but the word clench, his term for puns. To see his original use of the phrase, go to: Dryden on Punning.

Eastman went on to discuss three types of puns: pointless (also known as atrocious), witty, and poetic. To read his analysis, go to: Eastman on Puns.

Earlier in the piece, Holmes derided punsters with this sardonic reflection: “A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented as if it begins simply A pun is a pistol let off…. To read Lamb’s entire essay, which includes a number of other metaphorical reflections on punning, go to: Lamb’s “Worst Puns” Essay.

Illustrating the joy to be found in punning, Lederer went on to write: “Punning is a rewording experience. The inveterate (not invertebrate) punster believes that a good pun is like a good steak—a rare medium well done.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: I first discovered this quotation in Richard Lederer’s Get Thee to a Punnery (1988), but have been unable to track down an original source. While it may accurately reflect Morley’s view of puns, the evidence suggests that it is not an exact quotation. It may have all begun with this passage from Weigh the Word, a 1957 language arts textbook by Charles P. Jennings, Nancy King, and Marjorie Stevenson: “While to Christopher Morley a pun is language on vacation, to the non-punster it may seem more like language in agony.”

Walter Redfern, in Puns: More Senses Than One (1985)

PUPPIES

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

PURPOSE

(see also AIMS & AIMING and ASPIRATION and CALLING and DETERMINATION and GOALS and INTENTION and MISSION and RESOLUTION and TARGET)

Allen continued by writing that a life without purpose will “lead, just as surely as deliberately planned sins (though by a different route), to failure, unhappiness, and loss, for weakness cannot persist in a power evolving universe.”

Allen continued: “Empty whims, ephemeral fancies, vague desires, and half-hearted resolutions have no place in purpose. In the sustained determination to accomplish there is an invincible power which swallows up all inferior considerations and marches direct to victory.”

QUOTE NOTE: In the letter, written in surprisingly adult language to his 8-year-old son Bob, Anderson was advising the young lad to pursue some other career than writing (his reasoning was that people would always compare him to his father, and the boy wouldultimately begin to hate him for that). He suggested a career on the stage—acting or playwrighting—saying “You are a natural dramatist with a quick imagination.” When the lad grew up he became a painter and sculptor.”

QUOTE NOTE: Another translation of the Aristotle thought has it phrased this way: “We will more easily accomplish what is proper if, like archers, we have a target in sight.”

Black preceded the thought by writing: “It is the paradox of life that the way to miss pleasure is to seek it first.”

QUOTE NOTE: America’s first female physician, Blackwell made this journal entry at age 23, when she first began to seriously consider a medical career. She preceded the thought by writing: “I felt more determined than ever to become a physician, and thus place a strong barrier between me and all ordinary marriage.”

According to Brand, Carlyle said this to a University of Edinburgh student who had not yet made up his mind about a course of study. Carlyle added: “Have a purpose in life, if it is only to kill and divide [meaning, “to butcher”] and sell oxen well. But have a purpose, and having it, throw such strength of mind and muscle into your work as God has given you.” In most anthologies, the quotation is presented as if the middle oxen portion never appeared.

QUOTE NOTE: There is some debate as to whether Disraeli originally said constancy of purpose or constancy to purpose. Both sides have some evidence to support their positions, but the foregoing version is the most favored.

QUOTATION CAUTION: This beautiful quotation, showcased in many internet quotation anthologies, looks like an extension of the sentiment offered in Durant’s 1932 book, seen just above. An original source for this observation has never been provided, though, so use it with caution.

QUOTE NOTE: Gide, who was twenty-three when he wrote this, was not particularly happy with himself and how his life was going. He preceded the thought by writing: “I have lost the habit of lofty thought; this is a most regrettable thing. I live in a facile manner, and this must not go on.” A moment later, he added: “I know that everything can be turned to advantage, provided one is conscious about it. And I have lived much. But one must certainly pull oneself together”.

In the book, Millman also wrote: “You can transform everyday life into a path of personal evolution and infuse each moment with new meaning and purpose. In random moments, silently ask yourself, ‘What is my purpose in this arising moment?’ Then do whatever needs to be done, in a wondrous and changing parade of purposes that shape the story of your life.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way many current internet sites present the quotation, but most accepted translations use the word aim instead of purpose. Here are two common translations of the full quotation:

“The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said, he who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.”

“When the soul is without a definite aim, she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere.”

Newbigin continued: “Yet we accept as the final product of this purposeful activity a picture of the world from which purpose has been eliminated. Purpose is a meaningful concept in relation to our own consciousness of ourselves, but it is allowed no place in our understanding of the world of facts.”

Nietzsche continued: “Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self.” A traditional translation of the first portion of the quotation goes this way: “Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question, ‘What hast thou up to now truly loved, and what has drawn thy soul upward, mastered it and blessed it too?’”

QUOTE NOTE: In Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Viktor Frankl quoted this famous Nietzsche passage this way: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” About the observation, Frankl said: “Nietzsche’s words could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts.”

In an Afterward to the book, written decades after the book was originally published, Ozick wrote that this and a few other aphorisms spoke “for the author of Trust in her twenties, and a little beyond.”

Parmenter preceded the thought by writing: “The need for devotion to something outside ourselves is even more profound than the need for companionship.”

Mrs. Roosevelt continued: “You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience for the adventure of life.”

QUOTE NOTE: Rosten continued: “Happiness, to me, lies in stretching, to the farthest boundaries of which we are capable, the resources of the mind and heart.”

In a 1962 talk at a National Book Awards luncheon, Rosten reprised the sentiment when he said: “The purpose of life is not to be happy—but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that I lived at all.”

The opening line of Warren's book was, “It’s not about you,” and in the second, he went on to write:

“The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions. If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by his purpose and for his purpose.”

Warren preceded the thought by writing: “Without God, life has no purpose, and without purpose, life has no meaning. Without meaning, life has no significance or hope.”

PURSE (as in HANDBAG)

(see also HANDBAG and POCKETBOOK and WALLET)

PURSUIT [as in QUEST]

(see also AIMS & AIMING and GOALS and HAPPINESS and OBJECTIVES and PASSION and PURPOSE and SEARCH & SEARCHING and TARGET and QUEST)

Hagberg continued: “Passion comes when we connect with the things, people, causes, or issues that touch us at our deepest place.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is not the first time that wild-goose chase was used to describe a fruitless undertaking. That honor goes to William Shakespeare, who first used the expression in Romeo and Juliet. In his notebook entry, Hawthorne continued:

“Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it; but likely enough it is gone the moment we say to ourselves, 'Here it is!' like the chest of gold that treasure-seekers find.”

These are among the most famous words ever written, originally appearing in a document drafted by America’s Founding Fathers to formally declare their grievances against the government of King George III and sever ties with England. The notion that happiness was an inalienable right of citizens—as opposed to a personal dream or goal to which people might aspire—was truly a revolutionary idea. Historians have pointed out that Jefferson might easily have written “Life, Liberty, and Property” (following some earlier phraseology from John Locke). Happily, though, he submitted a first-draft to other delegates and incorporated a number of suggestions, including one to change the wording to the pursuit of happiness. That immortal phrase made its first formal appearance in the historic 1776 document, but a prior—and less elegant—expression of the sentiment appeared less than a month earlier in The Virginia Declaration of Rights (adopted June 12, 1776). The opening paragraph of that document, written by George Mason, reads as follows (italics mine):

“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Montagu preceded the thought by writing (also in a chiastic vein): “The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.”

PUTTING THINGS OFF

(see PROCRASTINATION)