Table of Contents

“T” Quotations

TABASCO SAUCE

(see also COOKING & COOKS and FLAVOR & SEASONING)

O'Rourke added: “The next best vegetable is the jalapeño pepper. It has the virtue of turning salads into practical jokes.”

TACT

(see also CHARM and COURTESY and DIPLOMACY and ETIQUETTE and MANNERS and POLITENESS and SENSITIVITY)

QUOTE NOTE: Orlando Battista was a Canadian chemist with a flair for wordplay. His Quotoons book contained nearly 5,000 wise and witty epigrams on a wide variety of subjects, including these additional observations on tact:

“Tact is the ability to agree with a person and still convince him he’s wrong.”

“Tact is like air in an automobile tire; without it, driving through life will be rough going.”

“Tact is the ability of some women to block a man’s advances without being deprived of his hospitality.”

“Tact is the ability to ask a person for a book you loaned him and succeed in getting back the other half dozen he borrowed from you.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has also been translated this way: “Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go too far.”

In an earlier novel, Young Duke (1831), Disraeli offered another memorable thought on the subject, this time about those who lack tact: “A want of tact is worse that a want of virtue.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly attributed to Sir Isaac Newton, most often with the art of rather than the knack of.

QUOTE NOTE: Randall described President Lincoln as “regularly and consciously” tactful in his dealing with people. And about the quality, he wrote: “Tact is not one thing only. It is a number of qualities working together: insight into the nature of men, sympathy, self control, a knack of inducing self control in others, avoidance of human blundering, readiness to give the immediate situation an understanding mind and a second thought.”

QUOTE NOTE: See TRIBUTE METAPHORS below for similarly phrased observations as well as for the original La Rochefoucauld maxim that inspired them all.

Wilder continued: “Many a car on the way of life fails to make the trip as expected for lack of this lubricant. Tact is a quality that may be acquired. It is only the other way of seeing and presenting a subject. There are always two sides to a thing, you know, and if one side is disagreeable, the reverse is quite apt to be very pleasant. The tactful person may see both sides but uses the pleasant one.”

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

(see RESPONSIBILITY)

TALENT

(see also ABILITY and GENIUS and GIFT and MEDIOCRITY and SKILL and TALENT & GENIUS)

Mrs. March continued: “Even if it is, the consciousness of possessing and using it well should satisfy one, and the great charm of all power is modesty.”

QUOTE NOTE: Alcott’s observation about hiding one’s talents was likely inspired by Jesus’s “Parable of the Talents” (Matthew 25:14–30). See also the Margaret Mead observation below.

Anouilh added: “Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.”

QUOTE NOTE: This was Baldwin’s reply to the question, “Can you discern talent in someone?”

QUOTE NOTE: It is rare to find a phrase as dramatic and evocative as “The suicide of his own talent.” I regard it as one of the best things ever said on the subject of squandered talent.

QUOTE NOTE: Smiles described the saying as “Beethoven’s favorite maxim.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation has become quite popular, but it is not an accurate representation of Berlioz’s original thought. Writing about the German composer Giacomo Meyerbeer in Evenings with the Orchestra (1852), Berlioz wrote more precisely: “The author of The Prophet not only has the good luck to have talent, he has also the talent to have good luck” (the original French was: “L'auteur de ce Prophète a non seulement le bonheur d'avoir du talent, mais aussi le talent d'avoir du Bonheur”).

QUOTE NOTE: Helen is imploring fiancée Arthur Huntingdon to use his talents wisely. She continues: “Therefore, if you choose to use the bad, or those which tend to evil, till they become your masters, and neglect the good till they dwindle away, you have only yourself to blame.”

QUOTE NOTE: Buckingham was giving advice to managers. He preceded the observation by writing: “Spend the most time with your best people.”

Emerson continued: “He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly present the quotation this way: “Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call.”

QUOTE NOTE: The narrator is here capturing a thought of the character Walter Bidlake. Bidlake is a journalist and literary critic who is feeling overwhelmed by all the the bad and boring books which keep coming his way. The narrator continues: “Immersed in his Tripe, Walter ferociously commented on lack of talent. Conscious of their industry, sincerity, and good artistic intentions, the authors of the Tripe felt themselves outrageously and unfairly treated.”

QUOTE NOTE: Irving was advising his nephew, who had recently succeeded in getting some of his writings published in a local periodical. Irving believed it was an error to offer one’s thoughts for publication at such an early age, saying, “It begets an eagerness to reap before one has sown.” Irving even attempted to dissuade the young man from a literary career. “There is no life more precarious in its profits and fallacious in its enjoyments than that of an author,” the successful author surprisingly wrote. He also expanded on the idea of exerting one’s talents, offered above, by writing: “A barking dog is often more useful than a sleepy lion. Endeavor to make your talents convertible to ready use, prompt for the occasion, and adapted to the ordinary purposes of life; cultivate strength rather than gracefulness; in our country it is the useful, not the ornamental, that is in demand.”

King added: “No writer, painter, or actor—no artist—is ever handed a sharp knife (although a few people are handed almighty big ones; the name we give to the artist with the big knife is ‘genius’), and we hone with varying degrees of zeal and aptitude.”

QUOTE NOTE: This passage has also been commonly translated: “It is a great ability to be able to conceal one’s ability.”

QUOTE NOTE: Mead was arguing that the insights of anthropology—however modest—were extremely important in the modern world, especially during times of crisis. In crafting the observation, she was likely inspired by the earlier Louisa May Alcott observation.

Smith continued: “Every day sends to their graves a number of obscure men who have only remained obscure because their timidity has prevented them from making a first effort.”

In the heavily semi-autobiographical novel, Morgan continued: “The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.”

TALENT & GENIUS

(see also ABILITY and GENIUS and GIFT and MEDIOCRITY and SKILL and TALENT)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation is typically presented, but it was originally offered in one of of the most impressibe compliments ever paid to a public figure: “You can do something with talent, but nothing with genius, and Mr. Winston Churchill has a touch of—what we all recognize but can never define—Genius.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the observation has been traditionally translated, and it seems closest to the original German. On most internet sites, though, you will find this more streamlined version: “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

TALKING & LISTENING

(see also COMMUNICATION and CONVERSATION and ELOQUENCE and LANGUAGE and LISTENING and PUBLIC SPEAKING and SILENCE and SPEECH & SPEAKING and SPEECHES & SPEECHMAKING and [Shop] TALK and VOICE and WORDS)

TALK & TALKING

(see also COMMUNICATION and CONVERSATION and ELOQUENCE and LANGUAGE and LISTENING and PUBLIC SPEAKING and SILENCE and SPEECH & SPEAKING and SPEECHES & SPEECHMAKING and [Shop] TALK and VOICE and WORDS)

[Shop] TALK

(see also ACADEMESE and BABBLE and JARGON and LANGUAGE and TALK and WORDS)

[Small] TALK

(see also COMMUNICATION and CONVERSATION and LISTENING and SPEECH & SPEAKING and SPEECHES & SPEECHMAKING and TALK & TALKING and [Empty] TALK and [Shop] TALK and WORDS)

Dr. Brothers went on to add: “Usually, even close friends in small groups exchange this kind of pleasantry when they first meet. It’s a kind of warm-up exercise for the emotional muscles.”

Waymon went on to add: “But mastering small talk skills is more important in today’s business environment than ever before.”

TANGO

(see also BALLET and DANCE—SPECIFIC TYPES N.E.C. and DISCO and FOXTROT and WALTZ)

TARGET

(see also AIMS & AIMING and ARCHERY and ASPIRATION and GOALS and MISSION and PURPOSE)

QUOTE NOTE: Another translation of the Aristotle thought has it phrased this way: “It concerns us to know the purposes we seek in life, for then, like archers aiming at a definite mark, we shall be more likely to attain what we want.”

TARRAGON

(see SPICES & SEASONINGS)

TASTE (as in SENSE)

TASTE (as in AESTHETICS)

(see also APPRECIATION and JUDGMENT and [Bad] TASTE and [Good] TASTE and PREFERENCES and VULGARITY)

Arendt introduced the thought by writing: “No argument can persuade me to like oysters if I do not like them.”

Sontag continued: “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.”

[Bad] TASTE

(see also APPRECIATION and JUDGMENT and TASTE and [Good] TASTE and PREFERENCES and VULGARITY)

Vreeland continued: “We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty. It’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”

[Good] TASTE

(see also APPRECIATION and JUDGMENT and TASTE and [Bad] TASTE and PREFERENCES and VULGARITY)

TAUNTS

(see also COMEBACK INSULT and PUT-DOWN and REPARTEE and RETORT)

TAXES & TAXATION

(see also GOVERNMENT and LAWS & LEGISLATION and POLITICS)

QUOTE NOTE: No original source has ever been provided for this famous observation from Louis XIV’s Minister of Finance, and this is the earliest attribution I’ve found. These days, the quotation is most commonly presented in the following way:

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to procure the greatest quantity of feathers with the least possible amount of hissing.”

QUOTE NOTE: In a Nov. 18, 1989 appearance on PBS-TV’s Firing Line, Barry Goldwater offered an observation that was almost certainly inspired by the Rogers observation: “The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.”

QUOTE NOTE: Roosevelt was almost certainly inspired by the earlier observation from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

TEA

(see also COFFEE and DRINK and PASTRIES and THIRST)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the quotation almost always appears, but in the play, Lady Matchless introduced the remark by saying: “Tea! The panacea for everything from weariness to a cold to a murder.”

Repplier had earlier written that disputants “are as a rule peacefully disposed” while drinking tea. She added about the tea-hour: “Sinners and publicans are battling forever with Scribes and Pharisees; but the noise of their strife is lost in the hissing of the kettle—a tranquillizing sound, second only to the purring of a cat.”

TEACHERS & TEACHING

(includes SCHOOLMASTERS & HEADMASTERS; see also COLLEGE and EDUCATION & EDUCATORS and HIGH SCHOOL and INSTRUCTION & INSTRUCTORS and KNOWLEDGE and LEARNING and PROFESSORS and SCHOOL and STUDENTS and TUTORS & TUTORING)

Albom continued: “If you are lucky enough to find your way to such teachers, you will always find your way back. Sometimes it is only in your head. Sometimes it is right alongside their beds.”

Amiel added: “We must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.”

In her memoir, Ashton-Warner also wrote on the subject: “When I teach people I marry them.”

ERROR ALERT: This observation is often mistakenly attributed to specific individuals, most commonly Dr. Jill Biden. The original author remains unknown.

ERROR ALERT: This is one of the best metaphors ever offered about teachers, and it clearly represents what Buscaglia believed about Kazantzakis. Every Internet site, though, and hundreds of books by and about teachers drop the first four words (“Nikos Kazantzakis suggests that”) and present the remainder as a direct quotation from the great Greek writer. Many of the erroneous presentations of the sentiment also differ in other key ways from Buscaglia’s original wording (most commonly, ideal teachers is replaced by true teachers, or the word ideal is dropped completely, with the purported quotation beginning, “Teachers are those who….”

Cary continued: “The most effective teacher will always be biased, for the chief force in teaching is confidence and enthusiasm,”

QUOTE NOTE: In 1912, Dana was a Newark, New Jersey librarian when he was asked to supply a Latin quotation suitable for inscription on a new building at Newark State College (now Kean College of New Jersey), in Union, New Jersey. Dana was unable to find an appropriate quotation, so he composed the saying above, and it ultimately became the motto of the college.

The words come from the protagonist, who continues: “Curiosity itself can be vivid and wholesome only in proportion as the mind is contented and happy. Those acquirements crammed by force into the minds of children simply clog and stifle intelligence. In order that knowledge be properly digested, it must have been swallowed with a good appetite.”

QUOTE NOTE: For the best thing ever said on teaching and love, see the Theodore Roethke entry below.

Jung continued: “The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.”

King continued: “We are convinced this ability, this gift, is evidence that they were ‘called to teach.’ If the gift of sight is evidence, how greater must be the gift of touch.”

QUOTE NOTE: After graduating from the University of Maine in 1970, King had grand dreams of becoming a writer, but took a job as a high school English teacher to pay the bills. He didn’t last long, however. Exhausted almost every night after planning lessons and correcting students’ papers, he was sapped of any energy he might have devoted to writing. He captured the experience in the remarkable metaphorical description above. In 1973, he received a $2,500 advance for his novel Carrie (a year earlier, he had thrown the novel into the trash, only to have it retrieved by his wife Tabitha). Shortly after finishing the novel, but still months before it was published, the paperback rights were sold, earning the shocked writer a check for $200,000. The rest is history.

Maggio continued: “Most of us, no matter how long ago it’s been, can name our kindergarten teacher. Our first music teacher. Our junior high algebra teacher. Good teachers never die.”

Sondheim continued: “My life was shaped by teachers. First by a Latin teacher in prep school. Then by a man called Robert Barrow who taught music at Williams College and made me a musician. And then my postgraduate studies with Milton Babbitt. And then of course my collaborators. And I suppose, above all, Oscar [Hammerstein], who taught me virtually everything I know about songwriting, and a good deal about life.”

Truitt continued: “The Latin root of the word ‘education’ is educere, to lead forth.Teaching may elicit self-knowledge but unless it also leads students into an ever-broadening view of art and life, self-knowledge results only in self expression.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the full quotation, which is almost always presented in this abridged way: “The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.”

TEARS

(see also AGONY and ANGUISH and CRYING and GRIEF & GRIEVING and MISERY and SADNESS and SORROW and SUFFERING and WEEPING)

Amiel continued: “It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup of reverie.”

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation, more than any other, helped to popularize the notion of crocodile tears to refer to the feigning or insincere exaggerating of emotions for manipulative purposes. The notion is based on the ancient belief that crocodiles shed tears while devouring their prey. In formulating his observation, Bacon may have been inspired by the following thought from George Chapman's 1605 play Eastward Ho: “I will neither yield to the song of the siren nor the voice of the hyena, the tears of the crocodile now the howling of the wolf.” In The New Yale Book of Quotations (2023), editor Fred Shapiro writes: “The Oxford English Dictionary documents the term crocodile tears as early as 1563.”

QUOTE NOTE: In Notes From Plymouth Pulpit: A Collection of Memorable Passages (1859), editor Augusta Moore provided this abriddged version of the thought: “Tears often prove the telescope by which men see far into heaven.”

ERROR ALERT: This is the way the quotation is almost always presented, but it is, in fact, an abridgement of a piece of dialogue that originally appeared in “The Deluge at Norderney,” a story in Seven Gothic Tales (1934):

“Do you know a cure for me?”

“Why, yes,” he said, “I know of a cure for everything: salt water.”

“Salt water?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”

QUOTE NOTE: The thought comes shortly after Rachel’s husband, Mark Feldman, has informed her that he has been having an extramarital affair but has ended it. She expects an apology, but none comes. He then surprises her by starting to cry. If anyone should be crying, she thinks, it should be her. The heavily autobiographical novel was based on Ephron’s marriage to the journalist Carl Bernstein.

Estés went on to add: “Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace new, someplace better.”

Dr. Johnson added: “If there were wanting any arguments to prove that man is not mortal, I would look for it in the strong convulsive emotions of the breast, when the soul has been deeply agitated, when the fountains of feeling are arising, and when the tears are gushing forth in crystal streams. Oh, speak not harshly to the stricken one, weeping in silence. Break not the deep solemnity by rude laughter or intrusive footsteps. Despise not woman’s tears—they are what made an angel. Scoff not if the stern heart of manhood is sometimes melted to tears—they are what help to elevate him above the brute. I love to see tears of affection. They are painful tokens but still most holy. There is a pleasure in tears—an awful pleasure. If there were none on earth to shed a tear for me, I should be loath to live; and if no one might weep over my grave I could never die in peace.”

QUOTE NOTE: The passage has also been translated this way: “When Nature/Gave tears to mankind, she proclaimed that tenderness was endemic/In the human heart: of all our impulses, this/Is the highest and best.”

QUOTE NOTE: The idea of a track as something left behind to indicate the existence of something no longer present has been applied to many things, but Robinson’s 1967 R&B classic was the first to apply it to tears. The lyric began this way: “So take a good look at my face./You’ll see my smile/Looks out of place.” You can hear Smoky Robinson and the Miracles perform the song at: Tracks of My Tears.

QUOTE NOTE: This is a great lyric in a lovely ballad from a very talented singer-songwriter. You can listen to the entire song (with lyrics provided) by going here.

QUOTE NOTE: After ticking off some typical statements of regret (like “He never knew what he was to me” and “I always meant to make more of our friendship”), the narrator continued: “How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed!” And then a moment after that, the narrator continued: “There are words and looks and little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions, which speak of love, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a family that might not be richer in heart-wealth for more of them.”

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.”

TECHNIQUE

(see also ART and METHOD and SKILL and VIRTUOSITY)

QUOTE NOTE: Barth reprised the sentiment in his 1972 novel Chimera, where he had The Genie say to another character: “Heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal, Dunyazade; so does heartless skill. But what you want is passionate virtuosity.” The phrase became so singularly associated with Barth that Charles B. Harris selected it as the title of his 1983 critical study of the author’s works: Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth. Harris’s book also presented Barth’s most quotable version of the sentiment: “In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

QUOTE NOTE: This quotation—an example of oxymoronic phrasing—may have been inspired by earlier observations from Auguste Rodin and Leon Trotsky (see below)

In a 1912 translation, Romilly Fedden presented the thought in this way: “It is necessary to have consummate technique in order to hide what one knows.”

QUOTE NOTE: Trotsky, a leading figure of the Russian Revolution, was referring to the “breathless literary schools that followed the revolution.”

TECHNOLOGY

(see also COMPUTERS and ELECTRICITY and ELECTRONICS and ENGINEERING & ENGINEERS and INTERNET & WORLD WIDE WEB and INVENTION & INVENTORS and MACHINES & MACHINERY and PROGRESS and SCIENCE and SCIENTISTS and TOOLS)

Bell went on to write: “Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience with a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is commonly referred to as “Clarke’s Third Law.” For all three, as well as the story behind them, go to: Clarke’s Three Laws

Dyson added: “Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”

Embree went on to write: “America’s technology has turned in upon itself; its corporate form makes it the servant of profits, not the servant of human needs.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: The ellipsis occurs in the original German, as well as in the 1959 English translation of Frisch’s novel, but many quotation collections either omit it or mistakenly present the quotation as technology is the knack….

Hawkes, an acclaimed British archaeologist, preceded the observation by saying: “One tends to assume that if you don’t have a lavatory and perhaps something that will take you a lot faster than your feet, or a certain number of gadgets in the house, then you must be in some way, a bit backward and defective.”

QUOTE NOTE: This popular quotation was preceded by these words: “Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless. Indeed, it is worse than useless.”

QUOTE NOTE: Sagan returned to the theme in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995): “We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

TEDIUM & TEDIOUSNESS

(see also BORES & BOREDOM and DULLNESS and ENNUI)

TEENAGERS

(see also ADOLESCENCE and AGE & AGING and CHILDREN & CHILDHOOD and FAMILY and PARENTS & PARENTHOOD and YOUTH)

Paglia added: “They have only a brief season of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives.”

Snodgrass continued: “Whatever the lure—cars, easy money, cigarettes, drugs, booze, sex, crime—much that glitters along the shore has a thousand times the appeal of a parent’s lecture.”

TELEVISION

(see also CINEMA and CULTURE and ENTERTAINMENT and FILM & FILMMAKING and MEDIA and MOVIES and RADIO and STAGE and TECHNOLOGY and [Public] TELEVISION and THEATER)

QUOTE NOTE: This memorable indictment of television was originally the concluding portion to a fuller observation: “Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.”

Chandler continued: “Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.”

QUOTE NOTE: Beale, brilliantly played by actor Peter Finch in the film, is a longtime Television news anchor who becomes a national sensation after he has a dramatic on-air meltdown in which he proclaims, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” This boredom-killing remark came in a television appearance a day or so later. Beale went on to say about television: “We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now.” Finch went on to win a Best Actor Academy Award for his performance. This entire speech may be seen at “Turn Off Your Television”.

Hartmann continued: “Many drugs, after all, are essentially a distilled concentrate of a natural substance. Penicillin is extracted from mold; opium, from poppies. Similarly, television is a distilled extract—super-concentrated, like the most powerful drugs we have—of ‘real’ life.”

Hirsch continued: “But in some respects, such as its use in standard written English, television watching is acculturative.”

Kael added: “We almost never think of calling a television show ‘beautiful,’ or even of complaining about the absence of beauty, because we take it for granted that television operates without beauty.”

McLuhan continued: “The images wrap around you. You are the vanishing point.”

QUOTE NOTE: Minow, Adlai Stevenson’s law partner, was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, recently appointed to the position by President John F. Kennedy. His “vast wasteland” metaphor—likely inspired by T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”—was widely reported in news broadcasts at the time and went on to become an American catchphrase.

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this observation is mistakenly presented in this way: “It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve e minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.”

QUOTE NOTE: In this spot-on parody of the 1980 Jack Nicholson film The Shining, Homer and his family arrive at Mr. Burns’s winter lodge, where Homer has taken a position as winter caretaker. Worried that Homer might slack off on the job, Burns makes sure that no beer or TV is available. The absence of these two essentials in Homer’s life drives him insane, and he is convinced by an evil ghost to kill his family. Homer finally returns to normal after he begins watching a portable TV that Lisa has found lying in the snow. As he basks in the warm glow of the television set, he utters the words above. For more on this and other episodes in the series, go to: Simpson’s “Treehouse of Horror”.

QUOTE NOTE: This was Sheffield’s masterful metaphorical way of praising the high quality of current television programming. Sheffield, a longtime contributing editor to Rolling Stone, began his article by writing: “TV has always held a crucial place in the American soul: It’s our favorite thing to lie about. America still loves to lie about television—hell, that's the national pastime—but these days the lie has flipped. Remember when everybody used to claim we watched less TV than we really did? Kiss that era goodbye. For the first time in history, America is lying to cover up our desperate shame at not watching enough of it.”

Skeleton went on to add: “Socially I think television is going to have a wonderful effect. Families, instead of gadding about, will learn to stay home in the evenings as they used to. That’ll give its members an opportunity to know one another again.”

Wallace added: “And since there’s always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV’s going to avoid these like the plague in favor os something anesthetic and easy.”

[Public] TELEVISION

(see also CINEMA and CULTURE and ENTERTAINMENT and FILM & FILMMAKING and MEDIA and MOVIES and RADIO and STAGE and TECHNOLOGY and TELEVISION and THEATER)

TEMPER

(includes BAD TEMPER and GOOD TEMPER; see also AGGRESSION & AGGRESSIVENESS and ANGER and EMOTION and FURY and HATRED and HOSTILITY and MAD and RAGE)

QUOTATION CAUTION: This is the first appearance of a quotation that is widely attributed to Barrie, but has not been found in his works.

A moment later, Giles went on to add: “Indulgence in temper involves always loss of dignity, and in this way also it does harm. For the man himself this means a forfeiting of self-respect; and for other people, it means the diminution of their respect and of his authority.”

QUOTE NOTE: This appears to be the first appearance of the phrase hot temper.

TEMPTATION

(see also CORRUPTION and RESISTANCE and SEDUCTION and SELF-CONTROL and SIN and VICE and WICKEDNESS)

Abbott continued: “An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous; for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.”

Abbott continued: “There is no way in which virtue can be won save by battle; there is no way in which battle can be fought without possibility of defeat.”

Allen preceded the thought by writing: “Temptation shows a man just where he is sinful and ignorant, and is a means of urging him to higher altitudes of knowledge and purity.”

In his book, Battista also offered these other thoughts on the subject:

When it comes to keeping an eye on temptation, everybody has 20/20 vision.

Time was when temptation spoke in a whisper; nowadays, it parks out front and toots a horn.

The “Temptation” section of Beecher’s book contained a number of other memorable observations on the subject, including these:

No man knows what he will do till the right temptation comes.

Find out what your temptations are, and you will find out largely what you are yourself.

Every man has had his battle with temptations. Every man has had his scars.

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can’t be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.

Bradley preceded the thought by writing: “The force of the blow depends on the resistance.”

Sister Joan, a Benedictine nun and prolific author of books on spirituality, began by writing: “The gospels tell of Jesus’ journey into the wilderness and the temptations that faced him there. It’s an important story because it reminds us that temptations are a part of life….”

QUOTE NOTE: John Driden was John Dryden’s first cousin (Dryden the poet often spelled his own name with an “i” as well). While this line from the poem is casually understood to be about resisting temptation, Dryden was in fact complimenting his cousin’s decision to stay single and remain unmarried! Dryden continued: “Thus have you shunned and shun the married state,/Trusting as little as you can to Fate.” Reading the poem, one clearly senses Dryden’s dim view of marriage. A bit earlier in the poem, he describes his cousin as “Lord of yourself, uncumbered [sic] with a wife.” And just prior to the shun the bait phrase, he offers this memorable metaphor about the married state: “Two wrestlers help to pull each other down.”

QUOTE NOTE: Here, Gray simply rephrases a proverbial saying from ancient times and immortalized in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (to be seen in GOLD).

Nietzsche continued: “To win over certain people to something, it is only necessary to give it a gloss of love of humanity, nobility, gentleness, self-sacrifice—and there is nothing you cannot get them to swallow. To their souls these are the icing, the tidbit.”

Repplier continued: “Parental legislation for the benefit of the weak leaves them as weak as ever, and denies to the strong the birthright of independence, the hard, resistant manliness with which they work out their salvation.”

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites, and even one highly respected Mark Twain site, mistakenly present temptation instead of temptations. Many published books about Twain have made the same mistake.

TENACITY

(includes TENACIOUS and TENACIOUSNESS; see DEDICATION and DESIRE and DETERMINATION and DISCIPLINE and DISCOURAGEMENT and PERSEVERANCE and PERSISTENCE and RESOLUTION and RESOLVE and SELF-CONTROL and STRUGGLE and WILL)

Lucke continued: “Both qualities are good to have, but if you must pick only one, choose the latter. A writer without talent who persists is far more likely to succeed than a talented writer who gives up.”

Marden continued: “It is only practical dreaming that counts—dreaming coupled with hard work and persistent endeavor.”

QUOTE NOTE: Dubos did not provide a citation for this now-famous Pasteur quotation (which is now typically presented with the phrasing “led me to my goal”). After a number of unsuccessful attempts to find an original source, I turned to the Sherlock Holmes of quotation researchers, Garson O’Toole (better known as The Quote investigator). As usual, O’Toole didn’t disappoint. In a Dec. 28, 2019 Post, he writes that Pasteur first made the remark on Dec. 2, 1885. In an after-dinner address at the National Congress of Veterinary Surgeons, he said, “Let me tell you the secret that led me to my goal. My sole strength is in my tenacity.”

Pasteur was internationally famous at the time, so his speech was reported in newspapers around the world. A Nov. 18, 1885 edition of The Philadelphia Enquirer had this item: “Two hundred veterinary surgeons dined recently in Paris. M. Pasteur, in closing his response to a sentiment in his honor, said: ‘Allow me to tell you the secret of my success. My only strength lies in tenacity of purpose.’”

TENNESSEE

(see UNITED STATES OF AMERICA—SPECIFIC STATES)

TENNIS

(see also ATHLETES & ATHLETICISM and BASEBALL and BASKETBALL and BOXING and COMPETITION and EXERCISE & FITNESS and FISHING and FOOTBALL and GOLF and HOCKEY and HUNTING and MOUNTAINEERING & ROCK-CLIMBING and OLYMPICS and POOL & BILLIARDS and RUNNING & JOGGING and SAILING & YACHTING and SHIPS & BOATS and SOCCER and SPORT and SPORT—SPECIFIC TYPES N.E.C. and SPORTSMANSHIP and SPORTSWRITERS and SWIMMING & DIVING and TEAM and TRACK & FIELD and VICTORY & DEFEAT and WALKING and WRESTLING)

ERROR ALERT: In almost all quotation anthologies, the observation is mistakenly presented as if it began this way: “Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action….”

Tilden continued: “When I step on the court I feel like Anna Pavlova. Or like Adelina Patti. Or even like Sarah Bernhardt. I see the footlights in front of me. I hear the whisperings of the audience. I feel an icy shudder. Win or die! Now or never! It’s the crisis of my life.”

TENURE

(see also EDUCATION and PROFESSORS and TEACHING and UNIVERSITY)

QUOTE NOTE: In a footnote, Dennett wrote that he believed this brain-eating analogy was first offered by the Columbian-born American neuroscientist Rodolfo Llinás.

TERROR

(see also FEAR and FRIGHT and PANIC and SUSPENSE and TERRORISM & TERRORISTS)

TESTS [as in CHALLENGES]

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

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

TEXAS

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

QUOTE NOTE: Neff was governor of Texas from 1921-25.

THANKFULNESS

(including THANKS and [Giving] THANKS and [saying] THANK YOU; see also APPRECIATION and BLESSINGS and GRATITUDE and INGRATITUDE and OBLIGATION and THANKSGIVING)

Adams continued: “When one door closes, another always opens; as a natural law, it has to, to balance.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation has also been commonly translated this way: “A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.”

QUOTE NOTE: Gratitude is generally associated with “counting your blessings,” but Mann makes a strong case for being grateful for everything that results in our growth as human beings, including the suffering. Mann’s full remarks may be seen at Princeton Alumni Weekly.

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, Ashley is replying to Scarlett O’Hara, who has just said, “Oh, Ashley, nothing has turned out as we expected.”

QUOTE NOTE: The “grave divine” is believed to be John Donne.

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, this observation is mistakenly attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly say “conscious of our treasures.”

THANKSGIVING

(see also CHRISTMAS and EASTER and FOURTH OF JULY and HOLIDAYS and LABOR DAY and THANKFULNESS)

QUOTE NOTE: Thanks to quotation researcher Barry Popik for tracking down a source for this popular piece of verse.

THEATER

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

Bankhead's autobiography also contained these other observations:

“In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.”

“If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.”

“It is one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man can count on steady work—the night watchman.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is a wonderful observation on its own, but the story behind it makes it even more special. On the opening night of the the play Once In a Lifetime, which the 25-year-old Hart co-wrote with Broadway veteran George S. Kaufman, Hart was stunned when his esteemed collaborator went onstage to say, “I would like this audience to know that eighty percent of this play is Moss Hart.” Hart was stunned, and here is the full passage describing what that experience was like:

“I stood staring at the stage and at George Kaufman. Generosity does not flower easily or often in the rocky soil of the theatre. Few are uncorrupted by its ceaseless warfare over credit and billing, its jealousies and envies, its constant temptations toward pettiness and mean-spiritedness. It is not only a hard and exacting profession but the most public one as well. It does not breed magnanimity, and unselfishness is not one of its strong points. Not often is a young playwright welcomed into it with a beau geste as gallant and selfless as the one that had just come over those footlights.”

QUOTE NOTE: Hellman returned to the theme in her 1973 book Pentimento, writing: “Failure in the theater is more public, more brilliant, more unreal than in any other field.”

QUOTE NOTE; This is a legendary line in cinema history, delivered by Sanders in the role of drama critic Addison de Witt. Based on “The Wisdom of Eve,” a short story by Mary Orr that appeared in a 1946 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, the film was nominated for a record-setting fourteen Oscars (it won six, including Best Picture). The film holds one other major distinction: four Oscar nominations for females in major roles (Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for Best Actress, and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting Actress).

QUOTATION CAUTION: The book’s title page says the contents were “Digested From the Teachings of Konstantin S. Stanislavski,” so this observation may be a summary of what the great Russian director believed, and not a direct quotation.

Stone preceded the thought by writing: “Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job.”

Wilder preceded the thought by writing: “All the greatest dramatists, except the very greatest one [referring to Shakespeare], have precisely employed the stage to convey a moral or religious point of view concerning the action.”

THEM

(see (The) OTHER

THEOLOGY & THEOLOGIANS

(see also BELIEF and CHURCH and ETHICS and FAITH and GOD and HEAVEN and HELL and HERESY & HERETICS and MORALITY and PRAYER and SIN and SPIRITUALITY and WORSHIP)

A moment later, Child went on to add: “It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work theology has done in the world. What destruction of the beautiful monuments of past ages, what waste of life, what disturbance of domestic and social happiness, what perverted feelings, what blighted hearts, have always marked its baneful progress!”

Child went on to add: “What a vast amount of labour and learning has been expended, as uselessly as emptying shallow puddles into sieves! How much intellect has been employed mousing after texts, to sustain preconceived doctrines!”

QUOTE NOTE: A common alternate translation of the passage goes this way: “Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: “My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.” This stranger is a theologian.”

Mott continued: “No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing.”

THIN

(see also ANOREXIA and DIETS & DIETING and FAT and SKINNY and SLENDER)

QUOTE NOTE: According to Stevens, this was Barr’s response when Winfrey asked her if she ever felt as if there was a thin woman inside her, dying to get out.

QUOTE NOTE: This saying, which has achieved the status of a modern proverb, also appears in other phrasings, including “You can never be too rich or too thin” and “No woman can be too rich or too thin.” An original author has never been conclusively identified, but it is most commonly attributed to Wallis Simpson, who became the Duchess of Windsor after her 1937 royal marriage. The saying is also commonly attributed to Babe Paley and Truman Capote.

THIN-SKINNED

(see also CRITICISM and INSECURITY and [Overly] SENSITIVE)

THINGS

(see also ACQUISITION and BELONGINGS and [Conspicuous] CONSUMPTION and CRAVING and DESIRE and EXCESS and LUXURY and MATERIALISM and OBJECTS and OWNERSHIP and POSSESSIONS and PROPERTY)

Mrs. Adams continued: “We create a fairy land of happiness. Fancy is fruitful and promises fair, but, like the dog in the fable, we catch at a shadow, and when we find the disappointment, we are vexed, not with ourselves…but with the poor, innocent thing or person of whom we have formed such strange ideas.”

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: The line does not appear in the book on which the film is based, John Pearson’s Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J. Paul Getty (1995)

THINKING & THINKERS

(see also ACTION and BRAIN and CONTEMPLATION and DEED and EMOTION and IDEAS and INTELLECT & INTELLECTUALS and MIND and REASON and THOUGHT)

QUOTE NOTE: This is the complete opening paragraph of the book. In the second paragraph, Allen continued:

“As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them.”

Later in the book, Allen expressed the central idea of the book in this analogy: “As you cannot have a sweet and wholesome abode unless you admit the air and sunshine freely into your rooms, so a strong body and a bright, happy, or serene countenance can only result from the free admittance into the mind of thoughts of joy and good will and serenity.”

QUOTE NOTE: Anderson described this as “the thought back of the book” he was writing at the time, Many Marriages (1923). A passage in the novel features a similar extended metaphor, which likely inspired Anderson’s briefer expression of the thought. Here’s an abridged version of the fuller passage, from the novel’s narrator: “In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words being said at the same time down in the deep hidden places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions…. There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right…. Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles….”

A bit earlier in the book, Arendt had written: “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” The biggest threat, according to Arendt, is to established creeds and doctrines.

QUOTE NOTE: The words come from private detective Philip Marlowe, describing Carmen Sternwood, a woman he just met. Upon meeting Marlowe, she had said, “Tall, aren’t you?” and he replied, “I didn’t mean to be.” Her puzzled reaction stimulated Marlowe’s observation.

Conroy continued: “If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.”

Dewey introduced the thought by writing: “If we once start thinking no one can guarantee where we shall come out, except that many objects, ends, and institutions are surely doomed.”

ERROR ALERT: all over the internet—and in many published books—Dewey’s observation is mistakenly presented in this paraphrased form: “Anyone who has begun to think places some portion of the world in jeopardy.”

The narrator preceded the thought by writing about Goldmund: “He thought that fear of death was perhaps the root of all art, perhaps also of all things of the mind. We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in out hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear.”

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. In an April, 1946 issue of Woman’s Day magazine, Clare Booth Luce offered a variant: “What generally passes for ‘thought’ among the majority of mankind is the time one takes out to rearrange one’s prejudices.” The underlying sentiment about rearranging one’s prejudices precedes both authors by many decades, though. See this informative Quote Investigator post by Garson O’Toole.

QUOTE NOTE: Russell was marveling over Sherlock Holmes’s ability to “still the noise of the mind” by smoking his pipe or playing his violin. She continued the thought above by thinking: “The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets called the bat gol, the daughter of the voice of God, whe who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.”

Lebowitz was giving advice to teenagers, but her advice applies to people of all ages. She continued: “This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when you are in the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions.”

Reik added: “The originality of their thought is as provoking as the prominence of the lightning conductor which directs the electricity to the salient point on the roof.”

QUOTATION CAUTION: This appears to be the first appearance of this Royce observation, now quite popular. I have not been able to locate an original source.

Socrates went on to add that the result of thinking is often a decision, or a judgment. He put it this way: “I should describe thinking as a discourse, and judgment as a statement pronounced, not aloud to someone else, but silently to oneself.”

[Positive] THINKING

(see POSITIVE (opposite of NEGATIVE))

THOUGHT

(see also ACTION and BRAIN and DEED and EMOTION and IDEAS and INTELLECT & INTELLECTUALS and MIND and REASON and THINKING & THINKERS)

For this reason, Adams concluded chiastically: “No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean.” For more on the literary device of chiasmus and the structure of chiastic quotations, go to: What is Chiasmus?

QUOTATION CAUTION: Many internet sites present the quotation as if it ended the soul is dyed by the color of its thoughts, but this rendering appears to be a loose translation of the original journal entry.

Betti continued: “And if it loses the habit of words, little by little it becomes shapeless, somber.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation might have inspired one of Zora Neale Hurston’s most popular quoations, seen below.

ERROR ALERT: The first portion of quotation is often mistakenly presented as if it began: Great ideas are the mightiest influence on earth. For the full passage, go to Channing

Earlier in the essay, Emerson had written: “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment.”

Gibran preceded the thought by writing: “In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.”

Goldberg continued: “The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”

QUOTE NOTE: It was not words but language that was called “fossil poetry.” See the Ralph Waldo Emerson entry in LANGUAGE

In the book, Heine expanded on the topic by writing: “Mark this well, you proud men of action: You are nothing but the unwitting agents of the men of thought who often, in quiet self-effacement, mark out most exactly all your doings in advance.”

ERROR ALERT: This is the way the quotation appears on almost all web sites—and in countless books—but it's not exactly the way Hill originally phrased it. In his classic Think and Grow Rich (1937), Hill actually wrote: “More gold has been mined from the brains of men than has ever been taken from the earth.”

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: 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.

QUOTE NOTE: About this second class of thoughts, Paine wrote: “I have always made it a rule to treat those voluntary visitors with civility, taking care to examine, as well as I was able, if they were worth interesting; and it was from them I have acquired almost all the knowledge that I have.”

Sagan continued: “The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”

Spurgeon continued: “They cannot be too much cultivated; they are a crop which enriches the soil. As the hen broods her chickens under her wings, so should we cherish all holy thoughts.”

THREAT [as in DANGER]

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

QUOTE NOTE: Sexus, a fictionalized account of Miller’s own life, was the first in The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, followed by Plexus (1953) and Nexus (1959). The books were all initially banned in the United States, but became available shortly after the historic 1964 U. S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned a ban of Miller’s 1934 novel Tropic of Cancer.

THREATS [as in AGGRESSIVENESS]

(see also AGGRESSIVENESS and ARGUMENTATIVE and COMBATIVENESS and INTIMIDATION and QUARRELSOME and WARNING)

QUOTE NOTE: Eisenhower’s observation—made before his presidency—applies equally well to individuals.

TIME

(see also CLOCKS & WATCHES and DAYS and ERAS and FUTURE and MINUTES & HOURS and PAST and PRESENT and PRESENT MOMENT and [Wasting] TIME and TODAY and TOMORROW and YEARS and YESTERDAY)

QUOTE NOTE: The Thomas Paine simile mentioned here first appeared in Paine’s 1796 pamphlet “The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance.” Describing Prime Minister William Pitt’s approach to England’s national debt, he wrote:

As to Mr. Pitt’s project of paying off the national debt by applying a million a year, while he continues adding more than twenty millions a year to it, it is like setting a man with a wooden leg to run after a hare. The longer he runs the farther off he is.

Bailey Continued: “My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose.”

QUOTE NOTE: This wonderful observation contains one of history's best metaphors pn the subject of time: the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life. Later in the book, Bennett wrote:

“The chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.”

QUOTE NOTE: Cummings reprised the exact line a year later in his 1922 novel The Girl in the Golden Atom, where he wrote: “The Big Business Man smiled. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘is what keeps everything from happening at once.’”

ERROR ALERT: All over the internet, a number of variations of the sentiment—including “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”—have been mistakenly attributed to Albert Einstein (nothing close to it, however, has been found in his writings). The quotation, in a number of similar phrasings, has also been misattributed to Woody Allen, Richard Feynman, and John Archibald Wheeler.

Dillard continued: “Of course we have no idea which arc on the loop is our time, let alone where the loop itself is, so to speak, or down whose lofty flight of stairs the Slinky so uncannily walks”

In the book, Holtby also wrote: “Is this the final treachery of time, that the old become a burden upon the young?”

QUOTE NOTE: Lee masterfully tweaks a timeless metaphor and delivers it in a hauntingly beautiful way. Catch it in this YouTube video (38 seconds into the song).

In the book, Lindbergh also wrote: “What was time? Where had it gone? There was left only an outer shell she had up to now looked upon as time—a husk only. The husk of time split open and let fall one seed—one seed of eternity.”

Marvel concluded this quatrain by adding: “And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.”

QUOTE NOTE: This phrase first appeared in a poem Milton wrote on the occasion of his twenty-third birthday and included in a letter he sent to a friend. Here is the full couplet in which the phrase appeared: “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,/Stol’n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!”

QUOTE NOTE: Black Water is a novella based on the true story of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in 1969 after U. S. Senator Edward M. Kennedy accidentally drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. Through the eyes of the fictional character, Kelly Kelleher, a 26-year-old magazine reporter who is dazzled by the advances of a famous politician who is described only as “The Senator,” the story contains a number of compelling descriptions—like the line above—about what Ms. Kopechne’s final experiences must have been like.

Penn preceded the thought by writing: “There is nothing of which we are more apt to be so lavish as of time, and about which we ought to be more solicitous; since, without it, we can do nothing in the world.”

ERROR ALERT: Almost all books and web sites suggest that Sandburg said this at his 85th birthday party on Jan. 6, 1963, but McGill clearly indicates that Sandburg offered the remark as he reached his 88th birthday (he interviewed Sandburg at his cottage on Glassy Mountain, near Flat Rock, North Carolina). Slightly longer versions of the observation also commonly appear (including one that ends, “Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you”), but they are of questionable authenticity.

QUOTE NOTE: Steinbeck died in 1968, but The Paris Review ran the article in the space normally devoted to interviews with writers. Editor George Plimpton explained that Steinbeck had agreed to an interview late in his life, but was too ill to complete the project. Instead of a formal interview, the publication's staffers combed through his diaries and letters for observations on the art of fiction, and assembled them for the issue.

QUOTE NOTE: This passage is also commonly translated this way: “Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.”

ERROR ALERT: Theophrastus was a Greek philosopher who died in 278 B.C. On many internet sites, his observation is mistakenly attributed to the 4th c. B.C. Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (also known as Diogenes the Cynic).

Waitley added: “Rich people can’t buy more hours; scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

Williams concluded on a hopeful note: “But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.”

Zappa introduced the observation by writing: “A composer’s job involves the decoration of fragments of time.”

[Wasting] TIME

(see also DAYS and EFFICIENCY and PRODUCTIVITY and TIME and TIME MANAGEMENT)

Waitley added: “Rich people can’t buy more hours; scientists can’t invent new minutes. And you can’t save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you’ve wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

[Bad] TIMES

(see also ADVERSITY and CALAMITY and CRISIS and DANGER and DIFFICULTIES and HARDSHIP and MISERY & WOE and MISFORTUNE and OBSTACLES and PROBLEMS and TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS and TROUBLE and STUMBLES & STUMBLING and STRUGGLE and SUFFERING & SORROW and TEST and [Good] TIMES and TROUBLE)

To drive home his point, Emerson went on to add: “We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.”

TITLES [as in JOB or POSITION]

(see also BUSINESS & BUSINESS PEOPLE and CAREER and EMPLOYMENT and JOB and MANAGEMENT and OCCUPATION and OFFICES & OFFICEHOLDERS and ORGANIZATION CHART and POSITION and PROFESSION and STATUS and WORK)

TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS

(see also AUTHORS and BOOKS and DRAMA & DRAMATISTS and ESSAYS & ESSAYISTS and FICTION and LITERATURE and NOVELS & NOVELISTS and PLAYS & PLAYWRIGHTS and READING and TITLES—OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, & SHORT STORIES and TITLES—OF POEMS and TITLES—OF SONGS and WRITERS and WRITING)

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Angelou’s book—a fictionalized account of her early years—was borrowed from the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who originally crafted the line for his 1899 poem, “Sympathy” (for more, see the Dunbar entry in CAGES & THE CAGED). Dunbar, in turn, was almost certainly inspired by a line from John Webster’s 1612 play The White Devil: “We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.”

In his Introduction, Balliett wrote: “Jazz, after all, is a highly personal, lightweight form—like poetry, it is an art of surprise—that, shaken down, amounts to the blues, some unique vocal and instrumental sounds, and the limited, elusive genius of improvisation.”

QUOTE NOTE: Observations likening sleep to death have been around since antiquity (in the 8th c. B.C., Homer wrote in the Illiad about “Sleep and his twin brother Death”), but Chandler’s novel introduced what many regard as history’s single best metaphor on the subject. The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first novel to feature the fictional detective Philip Marlow and the metaphor appears for the very first time in the book’s final passage. Marlowe, in a reflective mood, thinks: “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, and were not bothered by things like that.” In 1946, Chandler’s novel was adapted into a film with Humphrey Bogart in the starring role (a later 1978 film adaptation starred Robert Mitchum).

QUOTE NOTE: Since the publication of Crane’s novel, a wartime wound or injury has been described as a red badge of courage. The novel’s protagonist is Henry Fielding, a Union soldier who feels deep shame after fleeing from a Civil War battle. The narrator says of him: “At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.”

QUOTE NOTE: Dwyer was a virtually unknown professor at St. John’s University (New York) whose lectures were so popular with students that he came to the attention of a Manhattan literary agent, who persuaded him to put his ideas into a book. Playing off the concept of erogenous zones, Dwyer came out with Your Erroneous Zones in 1976. He quit his job, loaded the back of his station wagon with copies of the book, and embarked on his own publicity tour of the United States. His dogged pursuit of media interviews and bookstore signings was so effective that the book became a surprise bestseller. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 64 consecutive weeks and even spent one week at Number One, edging out two other books with metaphorical titles: Gail Sheehy’s Passages and Alex Haley’s Roots. Dwyer’s publicity tour made him something of a legend in the publishing industry and Your Erroneous Zones became one of history’s most successful self-help books, selling more than 35 million copies.

QUOTE NOTE: While serving in the Royal Navy during WWII, William Golding witnessed more than his share of horrors, including the sinking of the Bismarck and the Normandy Invasion. After the war, his view of the world was transformed, and any prior illusions he had held about civilization were gone forever (years later, he said he had come to the view that “man produces evil as a bee produces honey”). While teaching during the day, he began working at night on a dark, allegorical tale about a group of boys who become stranded on a desert island and slowly degenerate from civilized English schoolboys to savage and vicious brutes. His working title, Lord of the Flies, was inspired by a name historically given to Beelzebub. It was also the name the boys gave to a fly-ridden pig’s skull they had mounted on a stake.

Golding’s manuscript was rejected twenty-one times by English publishers, often in the most unmerciful ways. And when it was finally published by Faber & Faber in 1954, it didn’t exactly fly off the shelves (pun intended). However, an American paperback edition in 1955 slowly became a word-of-mouth sensation and the book soon found itself on “Required Reading” lists at many colleges and universities. Now regarded as one of history’s great allegorical tales, it was ranked number 41 on The Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th century.

QUOTE NOTE: I selected this clever line as the title for my book on the literary device of chiasmus. I borrowed it from Joey Adams, who had put it into The Joey Adams Encyclopedia of Humor (1968). Adams was not the original author of the sentiment, though. That credit goes to the talented E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, who first laid it out in verse form in the 1941 poem “Inscription on a Lipstick” (later reprinted in his 1965 book of humorous verse Rhymes for the Irreverent): “Oh, innocent victims of Cupid,/Remember this terse little verse;/To let a fool kiss you is stupid,/To let a kiss fool you is worse.”

QUOTE NOTE: Roots as a metaphor for ancestry goes back centuries, but Haley gave the term new life and enlarged meaning in his autobiographical novel about Kunta Kinte—a Gambian adolescent who was kidnapped and forced into American slavery in the mid-1700s—and his American descendants.

QUOTE NOTE: The Well of Loneliness was the first major novel in lesbian literature (although the author used the now-dated term “sexual inversion”). The enormous controversy surrounding the book’s publication resulted in the first great public awareness of female homosexuality in England, America, and continental Europe. For more, see: The Well of Loneliness.

QUOTE NOTE: The phrase passionate virtuosity became singularly associated with Barth after it first appeared in a 1967 Atlantic Monthly article titled “The Literature of Exhaustion,” where Barth wrote: “My feeling about technique in art is that it has about the same value as technique in love-making. That is to say, on the one hand, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and, on the other hand, so does heartless skill; but what you want is passionate virtuosity.”

QUOTE NOTE: Hunter was a little known pulp fiction writer working for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency when he decided to write a novel based on his experiences as a vocational high school teacher in New York City (his working title was The Tiger Pit). The gritty novel became a bestseller, launching Hunter’s career. The following year, MGM came out with Blackboard Jungle, a blockbuster film starring Glen Ford as the embattled teacher and a young Sidney Poitier as one of his defiant students (MGM purchased the rights to the book while it was still in galley proofs, months before it was actually published). A year after The Blackboard Jungle was published, Hunter invented the penname Ed McBain for a new series of books he was planning to write about New York City police detectives. That series of books—known as McBain’s 87th Precinct Series—became phenomenally success, with more than fifty novels that have sold more than a hundred million copies.

QUOTE NOTE: The title was derived from this passage in the book: “The job of the writer is to seduce the demons of creativity and make up stories.”

QUOTE NOTE: Kennedy was a sitting U. S. Senator in his late thirties when Profiles in Courage was released on Jan. 1, 1956. It became an immediate best-seller (more than two million copies sold in the first year alone) and gave the junior senator from Massachusetts a national platform he would later use to launch a presidential run. The book went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1957, even though it had not originally been nominated. It is believed that Joseph P. Kennedy, Senator Kennedy’s father, was so incensed that his son’s book was not nominated that he used his considerable influence to get members of the Pulitzer Prize board to select it.

While Kennedy was listed as sole author, it was widely believed from the outset that the book had been ghostwritten by his speechwriter, Theodore Sorenson. For many years, Sorenson steadfastly asserted that JFK was the author and that he was primarily a researcher. However, in his 2008 autobiography, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, Sorenson admitted for the first time that he “did a first draft of most chapters.” He further acknowledged that he might have also “privately boasted or indirectly hinted” that he had written most of the book. For more on the book, see Profiles in Courage.

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Laing’s book was considered quite provocative when it was first published, but the concept of a divided self was first advanced fifteen centuries earlier, when St. Augustine wrote in Confessions (5th c. A.D.): “My inner self was a house divided against itself.”

QUOTE NOTE: When L’Amour’s daughter Angelique was putting together this anthology of her father’s best quotations, she found what she regarded as the perfect title in his novel Ride the River (1983). In that work, the character Dorian reflects on a life lesson learned from his father, saying: “As youngsters we were taught not just to learn something but to learn something else that went with it. Pa, he used to say that no memory is ever alone, it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.”

QUOTE NOTE: When Cosmopolitan magazine published Lehman’s novella in 1950, the title was changed to “Tell Me About It Tomorrow” (apparently because the magazine’s editor didn’t want the word smell to appear in print in the publication).

QUOTE NOTE: The title came from Lombardi’s name for the Green Bay Packers’ version of a popular play in professional football: the power sweep. The metaphor of “going for the daylight” went on to become extremely popular, especially in business and politics.

QUOTE NOTE: A short flight is a brilliant metaphor for an aphorism, and a perfect title for a compilation of aphorisms. Lough and Stein’s quotation anthology was subtitled: Thirty-Two Modern Writers Share Aphorisms of Insight, Inspiration, and Wit.

QUOTE NOTE: McCuller’s debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter quickly rose to the top the New York Times bestseller list and established the 23-year-old writer as a major new voice in American fiction. Now considered an American classic, it was ranked 17 on The Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th century. It was also adapted into a 1968 film, starring Alan Arkin, Sondra Locke, and Cicely Tyson. In a beautiful 2014 painting, also titled “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” English artist Joe Simpson portrayed two single people reading copies of McCuller’s book—in the original book jackets—while riding in a subway train in London’s Underground.

QUOTE NOTE: The notion that something could disappear rapidly and be gone with—or in—the wind had been around since the nineteenth century, and Mitchell had even put the expression into a plaintive remark from the character Pansy, who says as she flees burning Atlanta: “Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind that had swept through Georgia?” In the early stages of her novel, Mitchell did not have a working title, having considered Bugles Sang True, None So Blind, and Not in Our Stars (her editor at Macmillan simply referred to the work-in-progress as “The Old South manuscript”). Still undecided when she submitted the final manuscript, Mitchell gave her editor a list of twenty-two possible titles, along with an indication that she was leaning toward Gone With the Wind. Today, it is impossible to imagine any other title for the novel.

When Ben Hecht was writing the screenplay for the novel, he seemed to immediately grasp the significance of the metaphorical title. He dropped Pansy’s line completely and gave it to the narrator of the story. Here are the opening words of the 1939 film (spoken by the narrator as they scroll up the screen): “There was a land of Cavaliers and cotton fields called the Old South. Here in this patrician world The Age of Chivalry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Masters and Slaves. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.”

QUOTE NOTE: The film adaptation, written and directed by Parks, was the first Hollywood film directed by a black person. In 1969, the film was placed in the National Film Registry of the Library of congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

QUOTE NOTE: The title of the series, which began with A Question of Upbringing in 1951 and ended with Hearing Secret Harmonies in 1975, was borrowed from a seventeenth-century painting of the same name by the French painter Nicolas Poussin. The Modern Library ranked Powell’s entire series number 43 on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the twentieth century. When Hilary Spurling, Powell’s official biographer, did an exhaustive annotated guide to the series, it was only appropriate that she gave the work a metaphorical title: Invitation to the Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time (1977)

QUOTE NOTE: At one level, the title refers to the rainbow-shaped trajectory of a V–2 rocket. Shortly after it is explosively launched, the rocket comes under the influence of gravity and follows a predictable parabolic trajectory as it progresses toward its target. At another level, the title may be seen as a metaphor for the essential human predicament—every ascent, no matter how soaring, is ultimately followed by a descent.

QUOTE NOTE: This was Schulz’s first compilation of Peanuts cartoon strips and the first of his many New York Times bestsellers. The warm puppy line was first delivered by the character Lucy in an April 25, 1960 strip (it may be seen at “Warm Puppy”).

QUOTE NOTE: Petruchio’s attempts to transform the hot-tempered and headstrong Kate into an obedient wife may look blatantly misogynistic to a modern eye, but centuries of theatergoers have been fascinated by the play’s exploration of gender dynamics.

QUOTE NOTE: One of the great American novels, the book about Oklahoma tenant farmers forced by drought to leave their homes was a critical and commercial success, winning a National Book Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The Modern Library ranked it number 10 on its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th century. Steinbeck was struggling to find a title for his novel when his wife Carol suggested he borrow the powerful phrase from Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:/He is trampling our the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;/He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:/His truth is Marching on.”

QUOTE NOTE: The title, of course, comes from the Jonathan Swift quotation: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” The novel, published eleven years after Toole’s death at age 31 by suicide, won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

QUOTE NOTE: Robert Traver was the pen name of John D. Voelker, a Michigan lawyer/judge who wrote novels in his spare time. The novel is fictionalized account of a real murder and subsequent trial in a small community in Northern Michigan (Voelker was the criminal defense attorney at the trial). A surprise best-seller, the novel was quickly adapted into a critically-acclaimed 1959 movie of the same title. For more, see the Anatomy of a Murder entry in Titles—of Films.

Tuchman nicely expressed her central thesis in the very first words of the book: “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.”

TITLES—OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, & SHORT STORIES

(see also TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS and TITLES—OF FILMS and TITLES—OF POEMS and TITLES—OF SONGS)

QUOTE NOTE: Often regarded as one of Schwarz’s most influential short stories, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” was written over a July weekend in 1935 when the author was only twenty-one, and published two and a half years later in Partisan Review’s very first issue as a literary magazine (Vladimir Nabokov had read and recommended publication of the story). Schwartz borrowed the title from William Butler Yeats, who used “In dreams begin responsibility” as the epigraph for his 1914 volume of poems Responsibilities (Yeats said he got the line from “An old play,” but did not provide the title). The entire Partisan Review issue, including Schwarz’s short story, may be seen at Partisan Review

TITLES—OF FILMS

(see also TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS and TITLES—OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, & SHORT STORIES and TITLES—OF POEMS and TITLES—OF SONGS)

QUOTE NOTE: With a talented ensemble cast and a spectacular soundtrack, The Big Chill was one of the most popular films of 1983. The plot is straightforward: seven friends, all college radicals in the turbulent 1960s, have a spontaneous fifteen-year reunion after attending the funeral of a college friend who has recently committed suicide. Fans of the film had spirited differences of opinion about the meaning of the title. Some, almost certainly influenced by the opening scene in which the dead man (Kevin Costner’s body, in his only scene) is being prepared by a mortician for the funeral, suggested it was a metaphor for death, similar to The Big Sleep (see the Raymond Chandler entry in TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS). Others thought it might have something to do with the slang terms to chill or to chill out. Lawrence Kasdan, the film’s producer and co-screenwriter, finally put an end to the speculation when he said: “The Big Chill deals with members of my generation who have discovered that not everything they wanted is possible, that not every ideal they believed in has stayed in the forefront of their intentions. The Big Chill is about a cooling process that takes place for every generation when they move from the outward-directed, more idealistic concerns of their youth to a kind of self-absorption, a self-interest which places their personal desires above those of the society or even an ideal.” For more on the film, including some other interpretations of the meaning of the title, go to TCM/The Big Chill.

QUOTE NOTE: The Learning Tree, based on Parks’s 1964 semi-autobiographical novel by the same title, was the first Hollywood film directed by a black person. In 1969, the film was placed in the National Film Registry of the Library of congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

TITLES—OF POEMS

(see also TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS and TITLES—OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, & SHORT STORIES and TITLES—OF FILMS and TITLES—OF SONGS)

QUOTE NOTE: There are a number of actual bridge structures that have been given this moniker over the centuries, the first one built in Venice, Italy in 1600. Hood was the first person to give the title to an artistic creation, but others have followed suit, including Jacques Offenbach with an 1861 operetta and American writer Richard Russo with a 2007 novel. Hood’s poem, which went on to be widely anthologized, was inspired by the tragic suicide of a homeless woman who had leapt to her death from London’s Waterloo Bridge.

TITLES—OF SONGS

(see also TITLES—OF BOOKS & PLAYS and TITLES—OF ESSAYS, ARTICLES, & SHORT STORIES and TITLES—OF FILMS and TITLES—OF POEMS)

QUOTE NOTE: Rudy Vallee & His Connecticut Yankees made this one of the most popular songs of 1931 (his rendition may be heard here).

QUOTE NOTE: A huge hit in 1900, the song went on to become one of history’s most popular sentimental ballads—the sad story of a young beauty who marries for money rather than love. A key lyric from the song goes this way: “Her beauty was sold/For an old man’s gold,/She’s a bird in a gilded cage.” For more on the song, including the entire set of lyrics, go to A Bird in a Gilded Cage.

QUOTE NOTE: The saying and the song are often attributed to Muddy Waters, but McGhee is the original author. In 1977, Waters recorded his version of McGhee’s song for his Hard Again album, presenting it under the title “The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock & Roll.”

QUOTE NOTE: This was one of the most popular songs from one the most popular musicals in Broadway history, sung by Mary Martin in the role of an American nurse stationed on a South Pacific island during WWII. The musical, based on James Michener’s 1947 novel Tales of the South Pacific, won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Martin’s original cast recording of the song may be heard here.

QUOTE NOTE: The title of Reed’s song was borrowed from Nelson Algren’s 1956 novel (see the Algren entry above. Reed’s song went in a different direction, though, celebrating an array of counter-cultural characters who inhabited the world of artist Andy Warhol (for more, see the Wikipedia entry on the song). See also the music video, which brings the characters to life.

TODAY

(see also DAYS and FUTURE and MONTHS and PAST and PRESENT and TOMORROW and YEARS and YESTERDAY and YESTERDAY, TODAY, & TOMORROW)

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: All over the internet, this saying—sometimes phrased with take up rather than use up—is mistakenly attributed to Will Rogers (and occasionally to John Wooden). Given, the president of the American Brake Shoe Company, expressed this and other observation about business and life in a pamphlet published by his own company. Thanks to master quotation researcher Barry Popik for his invaluable help in sourcing this quotation.

QUOTE NOTE: In Barack Obama’s eulogy at the funeral service of Sen. John McCain at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. (Sep. 1, 2018), the former president offered this Hemingway observation twice, first citing it as a principle by which McCain lived his life and, at the end of his talk, a thought Americans could take away with them to honor McCain’s legacy. Obama’s full remarks (the speech as well as a transcript) may be seen at Obama eulogy for McCain.

TOLERANCE & TOLERATION

(see also ACCEPTANCE and INTOLERANCE and KINDNESS and UNDERSTANDING)

Roth preceded the thought by saying: “Each individual has a right to pursue the path he chooses, providing that his actions are not destructive to the same freedoms of choice in others. Intolerance is a direct interference with the right of another.”

Einstein continued: “Thus being tolerant does not mean being indifferent towards the actions and feelings of others. Understanding and empathy must also be present.”

QUOTE NOTE: Keller was referring to religious tolerance here. She continued: “Long ago men fought and died for their faith, but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage—the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience.”

TOMORROW

(see also DAYS and FUTURE and MONTHS and PAST and PRESENT and TODAY and YEARS and YESTERDAY and YESTERDAY, TODAY, & TOMORROW)

TONGUE

(see also COMMUNICATION and ELOQUENCE and LANGUAGE and SILENCE and SLANG and SPEECH & SPEAKING and SPEECHES & SPEECHMAKING and TALK & TALKING and WORDS)

TOOLS

(see also INVENTION & INVENTORS and MACHINES & MACHINERY and PROGRESS and TECHNOLOGY)

Carlyle went on to write: “Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”

The narrator introduced the thought by writing: “A worker may be the hammer’s master, but the hammer prevails.”

QUOTE NOTE: This was the original English translation of the passage. A 1996 translation by Aaron Asher goes this way: “The carpenter is the hammer’s master, yet it is the hammer that has the advantage over the carpenter because a tool knows exactly how it should be handled, while the one who handles it can only know approximately how.”

QUOTE NOTE: Nearly a decade later, the thought showed up in Walden (1854) as: “But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.”

TOOTHPICKS

(see also FOOD and DENTURES and PROTEIN and TEETH)

TORNADOES

(see (NATURAL) DISASTERS)

TORTURE

(see also CRIME and CRUELTY and INQUISITION and PAIN and PUNISHMENT and SADISM & SADISTS and WAR CRIMES)

Auden continued: “Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.”

Brother William, talking with Umbertino about torture, continued: “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.”

O’Brien, who has been mercilessly torturing Smith in the dreaded Room 101, preceded the thought by saying: “Do not imagine that you will save yourself, Winston, however completely you surrender to us. No one who has once gone astray is ever spared. And even if we chose to let you live out the natural term of your life, still you would never escape from us. What happens to you here is for ever. Understand that in advance. We shall crush you down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years.”

Sullivan continued: “And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.”

QUOTE NOTE: Ventura was likely inspired by a 1970 observation from W. H. Auden, to be seen above).

TOTALITARIANISM

(see also AUTHORITARIANISM and DICTATORSHIP and NATIONALISM and PATRIOTISM and TYRANNY)

TOUCH & TOUCHING (Literal)

(see also EYES and EARS and FINGERS and HEARING and SENSE & THE SENSES and SIGHT and SKIN and SMELL and TASTE and VISION)

TOUCH & TOUCHING (Metaphorical)

(see also INFLUENCE and INSPIRATION)

TOURISM & TOURISTS

(includes TRAVEL WRITING; see also ABROAD and ADVENTURE and AIRPLANES & AIR TRAVEL and CRUISES & CRUISING and DISCOVERY and EXPLORATION and HOTELS & MOTELS and JOURNEYS and PILGRIMAGE & PILGRIMS and SIGHTSEEING and TRAVEL & TRAVELING and TRIPS and VACATIONS & HOLIDAYS and VOYAGES and WANDERING & WANDERERS and WANDERLUST)

A moment later, Boorstin added about the tourist: “He expects everything to be done to him and for him.”

A moment later, Axton added: “You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequences. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.”

A moment later Kincaid went on to add: “An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you.”

TRADITION

(see also ANCESTORS & ANCESTRY and CHANGE and CUSTOM and INNOVATION and PAST)

Chesterton continued: “Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

ERROR ALERT: This is the original source of a Churchill observation that is usually shortened to “Naval tradition is nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.”

ERROR ALERT: This is the actual version of a thought that is widely misstated on internet quotation sites as “Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.” The original source of the error is Laurence J. Peter, who presented it this way in his 1979 quotation anthology, Peter’s Quotations: Ideas for Our Time. If Peter had simply used an ellipsis (writing “Traditionalists are…pessimists about the future and optimists about the past”) his modification would have been proper. But he didn't, and that—technically speaking—makes it an error in the world of quotationology.

Nietzsche continued: “The respect paid to it increases from generation to generation, the tradition at last becomes holy and evokes awe and reverence.”

Pelican followed this lovely example of chiasmus by writing: “Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.”

ERROR ALERT: Many internet sites mistakenly attribute this observation to Jules Pfeiffer. John Pfeiffer (1914-1999) was an American anthropologist, and his observation originally appeared in his review of Gregory Bateson’s Mind and Nature (1979).

TRAGEDY

(see also COMEDY and COMEDY & TRAGEDY and DRAMA and GREECE & THE GREEKS and THEATER)

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites and most published quotation anthologies mistakenly present the thought this way: “The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.”

Hamilton continued: “And if poetry is true knowledge and the great guides safe to follow, this transmutation has arresting implications.”

QUOTE NOTE: Howells was talking about the American taste in theater and drama, but Wharton believed it captured Americans as a whole. She wrote: “What Mr. Howells said of the American theater is true of the whole American attitude toward life. ‘A tragedy with a happy ending’ is exactly what the child wants before he goes to sleep: the reassurance that ‘all’s well with the world’ as he lies in his cozy nursery. It is a good thing that the child should receive this reassurance; but as long as he needs it he remains a child, and the world he lives in is a nursery-world. Things are not always and everywhere well with the world, and each man has to find it out as he grows up.”

Mays, the longtime president of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, continued: “It isn’t a calamity to die with dreams unfulfilled, but it is a calamity not to dream. It is not a disaster to be unable to capture your ideal, but it is a disaster to have no ideal to capture. It is not a disgrace not to reach the stars, but it is a disgrace to have no stars to reach for. Not failure, but low aim is sin.”

QUOTE NOTE: Qabbani, a beloved Syrian poet, wrote the poem immediately after the Israeli defeat of Arab military forces in the Six-Day War (commonly described in Arabic as an-Naksah, or “The Setback”). The poem, which took the Arab world by storm, resulted in an immediate ban of Qabbani’s works by Eqyptian authorities (they also revoked his visa to enter the country). After the Syrian poet appealed directly to Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, all restrictions were lifted.

QUOTE NOTE: George Bernard Shaw was clearly inspired by Wilde’s oxymoronic creation when he gave a very similar remark to the character Mendoza in Man and Superman (1903): “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”

QUOTE NOTE: Veninga wisely pointed out that when we wake up in the coronary care unit, we don’t think about the job concerns that preoccupied us yesterday. Or when a child is lying in a hospital bed, we don’t think about last night’s missed curfew. He preceded the thought by writing: “A crisis event explodes the illusions that anchor our lives.”

TRANQUILIZERS

(see also ANTIDEPRESSANTS and ANXIETY and MEDICATION and MENTAL HEALTH and MENTAL ILLNESS and PHARMACEUTICALS and PSYCHIATRY & PSYCHIATRISTS)

TRANSFORMATION

(see also CHANGE and EPIPHANY and EVOLUTION and GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT and PROGRESS and INSIGHT and SELF-RENEWAL)

Cooper continued: “It contains, by definition, the purest message and promise of essential freedom. It touches us at the center of our awareness. When such a call occurs and we hear it—we really hear it—our shift to higher consciousness is assured.”

QUOTE NOTE: In introducing the poem before a reading, Kunitz said about it: “Every once in awhile, one is tempted to write a summing-up poem.” To hear him recite it, go to:“The Layers”.

QUOTE NOTE: 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.”

Later in the book, Mumford also observed on the subject: “Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.”

Nin continued: “I smile to think of myself at the banquet, where I struck men as ‘reserved and mysterious,’ and then, in my dancing, animated and coquettish and wild, I change, inwardly and out.”

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.

Wertmuller concluded: “Because the victories teach nothing. The victories are not useful. They are often dangerous.”

TRANSGENDERISM

(see GENDER}

TRANSLATING & TRANSLATORS

(see also INTERPRETING & INTERPRETERS)

Auden continued: “But, irrespective of success or failure, the mere attempt can teach a writer much about his own language which he would find it hard to learn elsewhere.”

Cole continued: “Good translators speak for others not for themselves.”

Collins preceded the thought by saying: “For the translator of poetry, there is no activity that brings you into a closer, more intimate contact with language, both the second language and your own language, which translation allows you to experience freshly. Of course, translation is the impossible art which is why it attracts often the best minds, at least those driven by difficulty.”

Comparing words to precious packages that are transported across national borders, Cooper wrote that few are “brought in unharmed and duty-free.” And then, extending the analogy, he offered this beautifully phrased thought:

“Translations, even under the most favorable conditions, always pay high tribute, in loss of meaning, loss of force, loss of style. It is like water, absorbed by a sponge and given forth again, inevitably a little less pure and limpid than at the start—and the purer and more crystalline it was at the start, just so much more in evidence are the impurities it has gathered. For a literary style, like a rare vintage of wine, suffers from a sea-change in proportion to the fineness of its quality.”

Campbell was likely influenced by the French proverb below.

TRANSSEXUALITY & TRANSSEXUALS

(see also ANDROGYNY and BOYS & GIRLS and GENDER and IDENTITY and MALE–FEMALE DYNAMICS and MASCULINE & FEMININE and MEN & WOMEN and SEX & SEXUALITY and SEXISM and SEX ROLES and SOCIALIZATION)

TRAPS & TRAPPING

(includes ENTRAPMENT; see also AMBUSH and CAPTURE and DECEPTION and SNARE and RUSE and TRICK))

TRAUMA

(includes [Childhood] TRAUMA and P.T.S.D.; see also INJURIES and WOUNDS)

TRAVEL & TRAVELING

(includes TRAVEL WRITING; see also ABROAD and ADVENTURE and AIRPLANES & AIR TRAVEL and CRUISES & CRUISING and DISCOVERY and EXPLORATION and HOTELS & MOTELS and JOURNEYS and PILGRIMAGE & PILGRIMS and SIGHTSEEING and TOURISM & TOURISTS and TRIPS and VACATIONS & HOLIDAYS and VOYAGES and WANDERING & WANDERERS and WANDERLUST)

QUOTE NOTE: In offering this thought, Angelou was almost certainly inspired by a popular Mark Twain observation (to be seen below)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is commonly attributed to St. Augustine, but nothing like it has ever been found in his writings.

Bacon continued: “He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.”

Beard continued: “History is handled no longer as a mere chronicle of dates but as a progression from one stage to a succeeding [stage]. So travel is no mere heaping up of episodes but an evolution.”

Bedford continued: “The world is hydra headed, as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. The ego wants to arrive at places safely and on time.”

QUOTE NOTE: Almost all quotation anthologies present only this portion of Benchley’s observation about travel, but he actually concluded it metaphorically: “Travelling with children corresponds roughly to travelling third-class in Bulgaria. They tell me there is nothing lower in the world than third-class Bulgarian travel.”

Broyard went on to write: “In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.”

QUOTE NOTE: Byron borrowed the term craving void from Alexander Pope, who introduced it in the poem Eloisa to Abelard (c. 1716). In the throes of love (“Oh happy state!” according to Pope), two souls are drawn so close together that “All then is full” and “No craving void is left aching [aking in the original] in the breast.”)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation, which originally appeared in a 1942 edition of Reader’s Digest, is commonly misattributed to Elizabeth Drew (b. 1935), the American political journalist. Elizabeth A. Drew (1887–1965) was an American poet and the author of a number of books on poetry, including Discovering Poetry (1933).

Durrell preceded the thought by writing the following, the opening lines of the book: “Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think. They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures—and the best of them lead us not only outwards in space, but inwards as well.”

we forget that for almost the entirety of human existence, simply to leave the safety of hut or castle was to risk not inconvenience but violent death.

On its own, this is a spectacular aphorism, well deserving of inclusion in any of the major anthologies of great quotations. It was also a special treat to discover it as the opening line to an article by one of my favorite travel writers. Iyer continued: “We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

Speaking about Englishmen who risked—and sometimes lost—their lives exploring the vast African continent, Lord Mandeville added: “What of less force than a passion could…induce men to fix their thoughts on undertakings whose difficulties and dangers were at once so obvious and so many. What but a passion…could support them through toil, hardship, and suffering.”

QUOTE NOTE: The 22-year-old Mozart was not simply talking about sightseeing in this observation, but about a deep exposure to the arts and cultural contributions of other nations. The knowledge that came from such travel, he suggested, was not only essential for superior individuals to fully develop their talents, but also contributed substantially to human happiness. He preceded the thought above by writing “I assure you that people who do not travel (I mean those who cultivate the arts and learning) are indeed miserable creatures.”

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.”

West continued: “I suppose that there are still facts concerning myself of which I am unaware. It seems possible, but not likely. A good many qualities which I either supposed I did not have, or, if I had, I would never give way to, have come out in the open. In this way travel is educational—the textbook to be studied is you, yourself, not the country through which you travel.”

TREACHERY

(see also BETRAYAL and DECEPTION & DECEIT and DISLOYALTY and DUPLICITY and LIES & LYING and TRUST)

TREASURE

(see also FORTUNE and WEALTH)

TREATY

(see also ARMISTICE and DIPLOMACY and NEGOTIATIONS and WAR and PEACE)

TREES

(see also ENVIRONMENTALISM and FORESTS & FORESTRY and ORCHARDS & GROVES and PLANTS and TREES—SPECIFIC VARIETIES and WOODS)

QUOTE NOTE: Abbey is an American poet who has been largely forgotten, but this poem of his lives on as a lasting legacy. It has been widely anthologized, recited at many an Arbor Day celebration, and in 1941 even set to music by Aaron Copland. The poem continues: “We plant the mast to carry the sails;/We plant the plank to withstand the gales.” The poem goes on to celebrate the use of trees in the creation of “A thousand things that we daily see.” The full poem may be seen at: ”What Do We Plant?

In an observation that seems even more true today than when it was written more than 200 years ago, Blake continued: “Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity…and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

Caldicott continued: “Trees are really upside-down lungs: their trunks are equivalent to the trachea, their branches to the right and left main bronchi, and all their branching twigs and leaves to small bronchi and alveoli, or air sacs, where the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place.”

Hesse continued: “When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.”

Hesse continued: “Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

This is the opening couplet of one of history’s most famous poems—and one of the most frequently parodied (for the most famous example, see the Ogden Nash entry below). For the complete poem, and more on its history, go to “Trees”. For a vocal rendition of Kilmer’s classic poem by the incomparable Paul Robeson (along with a remarkable collection of photographs of trees) go to: Robeson singing “Trees”.

To see the full poem exactly as it appeared when it was first published, go to ”Plant a Tree”

TREE METAPHORS

(see also ENVIRONMENTALISM and FORESTS & FORESTRY and ORCHARDS & GROVES and PLANTS and TREES and TREES—SPECIFIC VARIETIES and WOODS) (see also metaphors involving ANIMALS, BASEBALL, BATHING & BATHS, BIRTH, BOXING & PRIZEFIGHTING, CANCER, DANCING, DARKNESS, DEATH, DISEASE, FOOTBALL, FRUIT, GARDENING, HEART, JOURNEYS, LIGHT & LIGHTNESS, MOTHERS, PARTS OF SPEECH, PATHS, PLANTS, PUNCTUATION, RETAIL/WHOLESALE, ROAD, NAUTICAL, SUN & MOONS, TREES, VEGETABLES, and WEIGHTS & MEASURES)

TREES—SPECIFIC VARIETIES

(see also ENVIRONMENTALISM and FORESTS & FORESTRY and ORCHARDS & GROVES and PLANTS and TREES and WOODS)

TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS

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

QUOTE NOTE: The Revised Standard Version of the passage goes this way: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”

TRIBES & TRIBALISM

(see also ETHNOCENTRISM and XENOPHOBIA)

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often misattributed to Friedrich Nietzsche

The narrator preceded the thought by saying: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy.”

TRIBUTE & TRIBUTE METAPHORS

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

QUOTE NOTE: I regard this as the grandfather of all tribute metaphors. It is also commonly translated with the word homage replacing tribute.

TRITENESS

(BANALITY and BROMIDE and CHESTNUT and COMMONPLACE and FAMILIARITY and UNORIGINAL and PLATITUDE and PROSAIC and STALENESS and VAPIDITY)

TRIMPH

(see also DEFEAT and FAILURE and LOSS and SUCCESS and SUCCESS & FAILURE and VICTORY and VICTORY & DEFEAT and VICTORY OVER SELF and WINNING & LOSING)

TROUBLE

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

QUOTE NOTE: This couplet has become very popular, but few know that the inspiration came from frustration over an almost-empty tube of toothpaste. Here’s what preceded the poem’s conclusion: “Down the Tube/I’ve seen my wife with anger burn/At something that I never learn:/The toothpaste tube I squeeze and bend/At top and middle, not the end./She scolds me, pointing out my error,/Makes use of scorn and taunts and terror,/But I forget and go on squeezing/The toothpaste tube in ways displeasing.” Thanks to Barbara Harper whose 2006 blog post provided the original source of Armour’s poem.

QUOTATION CAUTION: An original source for this quotation has never been identified, but it has been popular since it first appeared in Day’s popular 1884 anthology. In the observation, wit is used in the archaic sense of mental capability or good sense.

QUOTE NOTE: More recent quotation anthologies, and many web sites, present a differently phrased version of the thought: “The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.” I’m still trying to track down an original source.

Beecher continued: “Some have floated on the sea, and trouble carried them on its surface as the sea carries cork. Some have sunk at once to the bottom as foundering ships sink. Some have run away from their own thoughts. Some have coiled themselves up into a stoical indifference. Some have braved the trouble, and defied it. Some have carried it as a tree does a wound, until by new wood it can overgrow and cover the old gash.” Beecher went on to describe how some very few people are even able to view trouble as a “wonderful food” or “an invisible garment that clothed them with strength.” The full passage may be seen at: Life Thoughts

QUOTE NOTE: This is the origin of the popular idiom sparks fly, which originally described an angry or hostile exchange and more recently has been used to capture a romantically-charged encounter (that is the meaning in the 2010 Taylor Swift song “Sparks Fly”), which simply asserts: I see sparks fly whenever you smile. In 1981, actor Stewart Granger titled his autobiography Sparks Fly Upward.

ERROR ALERT: This is the original version of a sentiment that gave birth to a modern American proverb: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Variations on the proverbial saying are commonly attributed to Mark Twain and Will Rogers, but there is no evidence either man ever said anything like it. For more, see this excellent 2018 post by Garson O’Toole, aka The Quote Investigator.

Shaw, a New York journalist, adopted the name Josh Billings in the 1860s and became famous for a cracker-barrel philosophy that was filled with aphorisms written in a phonetic dialect (he called them “affurisms”). Mark Twain was a big fan, once even comparing Billings to Ben Franklin. Almost all of the Billings quotations seen today first appeared in a phonetic form and were later changed into standard English. in this case: “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.“

Also on the subject, Cox wrote in her regular LHJ column:

“Too often in ironing out trouble someone gets scorched.” (1948)

In Coolidge: An American Enigma (2000), biographer Robert Sobel writes that Herbert Hoover recalled a similar observation from Coolidge: “Mr. Hoover, if you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you and you have to battle with only one of them.”

QUOTE NOTE: This looks like the earliest appearance in print of a sentiment that is often erroneously attributed to Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and others. Garfield was President-elect at the time, and the phrasing of his remark suggests that the underlying idea was already in common parlance. For more on the observation—including a number of what Quote Investigator Garson O’Toole calls “ideational precursors”—see this informative post. The versions most commonly attributed to Twain, Churchill, and others are generally phrased in the first person, as in: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.”

ERROR ALERT: The revised and enlarged 10th edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (1919) mistakenly ended the quatrain with the phrase in our own, and the error continues to show up on many internet quotation sites.

QUOTE NOTE: A similar observation is often attributed to Lady Holland (Elizabeth Fox), but I’ve been unable to find an original source or citation.

QUOTATION CAUTION: The original source for this quotation has not been identified, but the earliest appearance may have been in a 1946 issue of The Spectator, an English weekly magazine. The Kaiser Story, an official company history published in 1968, quoted the firm’s founder with this similar remark: “Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.”

Zorba continues: “To live—do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!”

Landers continued: “Trouble is no respecter of age, financial standing, social position, or academic status. Trouble comes to people in high or low places alike. It is not a sign of stupidity, weakness, or bad luck. It is evidence that we are card-carrying members of the human race. As someone once put it, ‘only the living have problems.’”

Landers continued: “Then repeat to yourself the most comforting of all words, ‘This too shall pass.’ Maintaining self-respect in the face of a devastating experience is of prime importance.”

Good trouble was one of Lewis’s favorite phrases, and he used it countless times in his speeches, interviews, and writings. In a earlier Twitter post from June 2018, for example, he wrote: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.” And in Carry On (2021), speaking about Rosa Parks and her decision to stay in her seat and not move to the back of the bus, he wrote: “She got into ‘good trouble.’”

In the book, McLaughlin also wrote: “Women are good listeners, but it’s a waste of time telling your troubles to a man unless there’s something specific you want him to do.”

“Every society honors its live conformists, and its dead troublemakers.”

Norris added: “The accident of losing a hairpin, or a child, or a train, or a tooth are all trouble, and certain natures will harp upon the one quite as seriously as upon the other.”

Paine continued: “’Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the passage that begins with Hamlet famously saying: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” The sea of troubles metaphor was not original to Shakespeare; he borrowed it from Euripides—who used it and a number of variants—in his works. For more, see ”Sea of Troubles”.

QUOTE NOTE: In Ajax (c. 447 B.C.), Sophocles returned to the theme: “It is a painful thing/To look at your own trouble and know/That you yourself and no one else has made it.”

Ward continued: “Like the tax-collector, he is a disagreeable chap to have in one’s house, but the more amiably you greet him the sooner he will go away.”

TRUST & DISTRUST

(includes MISTRUST; see also BETRAYAL and CONFIDENCE and LIES & LYING and RELATIONSHIPS and RISK and SELF-TRUST and SKEPTICISM & SKEPTICS and SUSPICION)

Angier preceded the observation by writing in the opening words of the essay: “What feels as good as chocolate on the tongue or money in the bank but won’t make you fat or risk a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission?”

QUOTE NOTE: This is an early—perhaps the earliest—appearance of the trust as glue metaphor, now quite common. In First Things First (1994), Stephen R. Covey and his associates offered this expansion of the theme: “Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships—marriages, families, and organizations of every kind—together.”

Buckingham went on to add: “If you are innately skeptical of other people’s motives, then no amount of good behavior in the past will ever truly convince you that they are not just about to disappoint you. Suspicion is a permanent condition.”

Covey continued: “But it takes time and patience, and it doesn’t preclude the necessity to train and develop people so that their competency can rise to the level of that trust.”

QUOTE NOTE: Hemingway preceded his observation by writing: “It is a miserable thing to have people writing about your private life while you are alive. I have tried to stop it all that I could but there have been many abuses by people I trusted. You cannot stop trusting people in life but I have learned to be a little bit careful.” Hemingway was thinking specifically about Charles A. Fenton, author of The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (1958). Even though Hemingway cooperated early on, he eventually severed ties with Fenton and urged his friends to shun his overtures.

ERROR ALERT: Most internet quotation sites mistakenly present the Hemingway quotation this way: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

The authors added: “Not only trust but the skills that make trust possible recede into the background. We pick up cues; we know when to make requests or offers; we know when to make or not make promises; we feel confident about situations and people because we know and understand the characters with whom we are dealing.”

TRUTH

(see also DECEPTION and ERROR and FALSEHOOD and HONESTY and LIES & LYING and [Absolute] TRUTH and [Naked] TRUTH and TRUTH & ERROR and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation is commonly presented, but the full version from Anderson’s 1935 verse play is as follows: “Will you tell me how a man’s /to live, and face his life, if he can’t believe/that truth’s like a fire,/ and will burn through and be seen/though it takes all the years there are?”

ERROR ALERT: This observation—in a number of variant phrasings—is attributed to George Orwell on almost all internet sites. It has never been found in any of his writings or speeches, however, and any Orwell attribution should be considered apocryphal.

QUOTE NOTE: In the essay, Bacon refers to Lucretius only as “The poet that beautified the sect” of Epicureanism.

QUOTE NOTE: This was the big idea that guided Bohr’s life and thinking, and he expressed it in many slightly different ways over the years (he often said the idea was first presented to him by his father). In his “Werner Heisenberg” essay in The Night is Large (1997), Martin Gardner wrote that Bohr liked to say that “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”

In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949), P. A. Schlipp presented the observation in this way: “The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called ‘deep truths’, are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth.”

Bracken continued: “And once they’ve chosen them, for good reason or no reason, they then proceed rather selectively, wisely gathering whatever will bolster them or at least carry out the color scheme.”

A little later in the book, Lincoln offered that related thought: “Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.”

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented as: “There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation appeared under the heading “Great Thought.” Chandler continued: “Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.”

ERROR ALERT: On almost every internet site and in numerous quotation anthologies, the quotation is mistakenly phrased as beautiful to seekers after it.

ERROR ALERT: Almost all internet sites mistakenly present this quotation as if it began, “The truth is incontrovertible” (typically, other elements of the quotation are also mistakenly phrased). The truth that was incontrovertible in Churchill’s opinion was that a separate Air Ministry with modern “air defenses” were absolutely necessary to England's survival in WWI.

QUOTE NOTE: Churchill made this remark just after Joseph Stalin formally approved fake invasion plans presented to The Big Three by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces (Churchill and FDR had already agreed to the plans). A year later, the historic Normandy invasion (code-named “Overlord”) succeeded in part because the deception worked. The fake invasion plans, after Churchill’s remark, were code-named “Operation Bodyguard.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is an example of the literary device known as chiasmus.

ERROR ALERT: This quotation is often mistakenly presented: “The river of truth is always splitting up into arms which reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.” The problem appears to have originated in 1989, when Webster’s New World Best Book of Aphorisms presented the faulty version.

QUOTE NOTE: Dickinson is suggesting that a poet should be completely truthful—notice the word all in the line—but adding the caveat that truth is often best expressed indirectly, and not in a blunt or bludgeoning manner. She ended the eight-line poem this way: “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind.”

QUOTE NOTE: In a 1956 translation of the play, Jacques Barzun rendered the thought this way: “One gulps down the flattering lie and sips the bitter truth.”

Dryden continued: “For they judge all actions, and their causes, by their own perverse principles, and a crooked line can never be the measure of a straight one.”

QUOTE NOTE: The words come from the character Saint-Savin, a philosophically-minded mentor who is advising the younger Roberto on how to best express his feelings to a young beauty who has smitten him. The two men have a fascinating discussion introduced in this exquisite way: “An amorous yearning is a liquor that becomes stronger when decanted into a friend’s ear.”

QUOTE NOTE: This observation, which Einstein made at age twenty-one, has also been commonly translated in the following way: “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”

Einstein preceded the thought by writing: “I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves—this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.”

Einstein preceded the observation by saying: “In matters concerning truth and justice there can be no distinction between big problems and small; for the general principles which determine the conduct of men are indivisible.”

QUOTE NOTE: The other flowers that Forster refers to here are human ideals, like Love or Beauty.

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the observation is usually presented, but it was originally part of this fuller thought: “I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don’t know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don’t doubt of yourself.”

QUOTE NOTE: Gordimer is playing off one of the most famous couplets in the history of verse, to be seen in the John Keats entry below.

The narrator continued: “There is that which should be destroyed and that which should be simply illuminated and studied. How great is the force of benevolent and searching examination. We must not resort to the flame where only light is required.”

Lessing continued: “Possession makes one passive, indolent, and proud. If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand.” In his 2007 bestseller God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens chose this Lessing quotation as the epigraph for the final chapter (“The Need for a New Enlightenment”) of the book.

Paine added: “The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness.”

QUOTE NOTE: This proverb is based on a Talmudic passage (Sanhedrin 29a) to the effect that people who add to the word of God subtract from it.

Stevens continued: “A composing as the body tires, a stop/To see hepatica, a stop to watch/A definition growing certain and/a wait within that certainty, a rest/In the swags of pine-trees bordering the lake.”

White introduced the subject by writing: “I discovered a long time ago that writing of the small things of the day, the trivial matters of the heart, the inconsequential but near things of this living, was the only kind of creative work which I could accomplish with any sincerity or grace. As a reporter, I was a flop, because I always came back laden not with facts about the case, but with a mind full of the little difficulties and amusements I had encountered in my travels.”

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.”

QUOTE NOTE: In the novel, Maisie was reflecting on something she recalled Maurice saying to her years earlier. She also remembered him adding: “As soon as you think you have the answer, you have closed the path and may miss vital new information. Wait awhile in the stillness, and do not rush to conclusions, no matter how uncomfortable the unknowing.”

QUOTE NOTE: In his open letter to French president Félix Faure, Zola accused the government of anti-Semitism and corruption in the conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish background. Dreyfus was ultimately exonerated, in large part because of French intellectuals like Zola. The entire matter is known to history as The Dreyfus Affair. Another popular translation of Zola’s famous observation goes this way: “If the truth is buried underground, it swells and grows and becomes so explosive that the day it bursts, it blows everything wide open along with it.”

[Absolute] TRUTH

(see also DECEPTION and ERROR and FALSEHOOD and HONESTY and LIES & LYING and TRUTH and [Naked] TRUTH and TRUTH & ERROR and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

Courdert continued: “He is worrying about whether he looks prepossessing, not whether you are dressed correctly. He is worrying about whether he appears poised, not whether you are. He is worrying about whether you think well of him, not whether he thinks well of you. The way to be yourself…is to forget yourself.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is the way the observation is usually presented, but it was originally part of this fuller thought: “I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don’t know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don’t doubt of yourself.”

[Naked] TRUTH

(see also DECEPTION and ERROR and FALSEHOOD and HONESTY and LIES & LYING and TRUTH and [Absolute] TRUTH and TRUTH & ERROR and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

TRUTH & ERROR

(see also BLUNDER and ERROR and DECEPTION and FALSEHOOD and MISTAKES and TRUTH and TRUTH & FALSEHOOD)

QUOTE NOTE: Huxley, who so avidly promoted Darwin’s famous treatise on evolution that he was called “Darwin’s Bulldog,” began his lecture by holding up a first edition of The Origin of Species. He likened the 1859 publication of the book to the birth of a baby (he said “the infant was remarkably lively” and described himself as “a sort of under-nurse”). In his talk, delivered a few month’s before the child would be celebrating its 21st birthday, Huxley went on to speak about the evolution of ideas in science, saying “A theory is a species of thinking,” and issuing a warning about treating beliefs as doctrine when he famously said, “The scientific spirit is of more value than its products, and irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.”

ERROR ALERT: Numerous web sites and even some respected quotation anthologies mistakenly present the first portion of the saying as that he is in error.

QUOTE NOTE: The Proclamation referred to in Paine’s famous open letter was The Royal Proclamation Against Seditious Writings and Publications, issued by England’s George III on May 21, 1792. Drafted by Prime Minister William Pitt, the proclamation against radical writings was largely a response to the success of Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791). Paine, in danger of arrest for openly advocating a British republic to replace the monarchy, fled to France, never to return to Britain. Several months later, he was tried in absentia and found guilty of seditious libel.

ERROR ALERT: Most quotation anthologies mistakenly say: “If you shut the door to all errors, truth will be shut out.”

TRUTH & FALSEHOOD

(see also DECEPTION and ERROR and FALSEHOOD LIES & LYING and TRUTH and TRUTH & ERROR)

Gibbons continued: “If it is a crime to counterfeit money, it is a greater crime to adulterate virtue. The more precious the genuine coin, the more criminal and dangerous is the spurious imitation.”

QUOTE NOTE: According to Garson O’Toole, the Quote Investigator, this is the earliest appearance of a sentiment that ultimately morphed into an anonymously authored saying commonly misattributed to Mark Twain: “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” The fuller passage from Swift’s essay is as follows: “Besides, as the vilest writer has his readers, so the greatest liar has his believers; and it often happens, that if a lie be believ’d only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.”

QUOTE NOTE: This is how the observation is commonly presented, but it was originally the conclusion of this larger passage: “Truth always fits. Truth is always congruous, and agrees with itself; every truth in the universe agrees with every other truth in the universe, whereas falsehoods not only disagree with truths, but usually quarrel among themselves.”

TSUNAMIS

(see (NATURAL) DISASTERS)

TUBA

(see also MUSIC & MUSICIANS and MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS—SPECIFIC INSTRUMENTS)

QUOTE NOTE: These were the remarkable opening words of Shaffer’s enthusiastic review of a unique new musical museum that had recently opened in Durham, NC. For another spectacular description of a musical instrument, see the Shaffer entry in BAGPIPES.

TWILIGHT

(see also DAWN and DAY and EVENING and MORNING and NIGHT and NIGHT & DAY)

ERROR ALERT: Most internet sites mistakenly present the quotation this way: “Twilight: A time of pause when nature changes her guard.” Thurman went on to write: “All living things would fade and die from too much light or too much darkness, if twilight were not. In the midst of all the madness of the present hour, twilights remain and shall settle down upon the world at the close of day and usher in the nights in endless succession, despite bombs, rockets, and flying death.”

TWINS

(see also BABIES and CHILDREN and BROTHERS and SIBLINGS and SISTERS)

QUOTE NOTE: In the story, Helen Stoner asks Holmes to investigate the mysterious death of her twin sister, Julia. In doing so, she recounts details about their upbringing and the strange occurrences that preceded Julia’s death. The quote is one of the earliest examples I've found describing the close bond between twins.

Holland continued: “Little we have done or said, or left undone and unsaid, seems to have made much mark. It’s hubris to suppose ourselves so influential; a casual remark on the playground is as likely to change their lives as any dedicated campaign of ours. They come with much of their own software already in place, waiting, and none of the keys we press will override it.”

TWIST [Dance]

(see also DANCE, DANCERS, & DANCING and DANCE-SPECIFIC TYPES and MOVEMENT)

On the revolutionary impact of the new dance on American culture, Cleaver added: “The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion, and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write in the books.”

TYRANTS & TYRANNY

(see also DEMAGOGUES and DESPOTS & DESPOTISM and DICTATORS & DICTATORSHIP and FREEDOM and LIBERTY and OPPRESSION and REBELLION and REPRESSION and RESISTANCE and REVOLUTION)

QUOTE NOTE: The moral to the Fable has also been commonly translated: “Any excuse will serve a tyrant.”

ERROR ALERT: According to quotation researcher Barry Popik, this quotation—with an attribution to Madison—began to appear shortly after the terrorist attack on the World Towers on Sep. 11, 2001. The observation has never been found in any of Madison’s writings or speeches, however, and should not be associated with his name. Even though Madison didn’t author the quotation in question, he clearly believed in the underlying sentiment. In a speech at the Constitutional Convention (June 29, 1787), he did say:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war whenever a revolt was apprehended.”

QUOTE NOTE: Bradshaw (1602–59) was an English jurist admired by Jefferson. This observation has never been found in any of Bradshaw’s writings, but the saying he purportedly penned was so powerfully phrased that Jefferson adopted it as a motto.

ERROR ALERT: Most quotation reference sources have presented the date of publication of this work at 1712–13, but it was in fact published in 1701. Defoe reprised the couplet (and more) several years later in Jure Divino: A Satyr, Book V (1706), this time formally spelling out the words would and could.

QUOTE NOTE: Defoe’s thought about men in general almost certainly inspired Abigail Adams to write about males in particular in a March 31, 1776 letter to husband John Adams. Mr. Adams was in Philadelphia at the time, working with other American colonists on a document declaring independence from England. Mrs. Adams reminded her own husband of the common problem of husbands tyrannizing wives by writing: “In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.”

Lyle continues: “Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission, bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”

Johnson preceded the observation by saying: “I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it.”

Lewis continued: “The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult.”

Montagu preceded the observation by writing: “Bigotry and science can have no communication with each other, for science begins where bigotry and absolute certainty end. The scientist believes in proof without certainty, the bigot in certainty without proof.”

QUOTE NOTE: The poem appeared in a powerful autobiographical work written while Soyinka was a political prisoner during the civil war in Nigeria in the mid-1960s. In 1986, Soyinka became the first African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.