A Quote by Barbara Mertz

If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson — © Barbara Mertz
If you take a man by surprise, and behave with sufficient arrogance, he will generally do what you ask. -Emerson
To ask people's permission to take their pictures? Sometimes it feels right to ask, but I will not ask, unless it is essential to do so. If you asked all the time, you would miss everything. With the exception of portraits, it is generally bad news if people are looking at the camera.
Arrogance generally is a bad thing, but with a band, somehow you have to have this gang mentality or this certain degree of arrogance to push forward an idea that's new enough that people aren't comfortable with it at first.
The only thing truly within our power, may be whether or not we will behave in each moment with arrogance or reverence.
When a man's knowledge is sufficient to attain, and his virtue is not sufficient to enable him to hold, whatever he may have gained, he will lose again.
Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.
I love the fact that it starts from there, and you don't know where it's gonna go. Wait long enough - love will find you. Everything's a surprise. When you think you've got it all figured out... as Emerson said, the dice of God are always loaded.
Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.
Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.
Arrogance is inimical to prudential reasoning, to accepting that for all we know and learn we also accumulate ignorance of the questions we do not ask, the risks we do not and cannot comprehend. In short, arrogance is what causes us to ignore our fallibilities.
But let not the foundation of our hope rest upon man's wisdom. It will not be sufficient that sectional prejudices find no place in the public deliberations. It will not be sufficient that the rash counsels of human passion are rejected. It must be felt that there is no national security but in the nation's humble, acknowledged dependence upon God and His overruling providence.
Playing villains is very liberating because unlike the leading man, nothing is expected of you. Leading men have to look good, they have to behave in a certain way, they have to fulfill an audience's expectations. But as a bad guy, you have free license to take the audience by surprise. And that's what audiences want - they want unpredictability from their villains. The villain's job is to subvert it.
The militia, who are in fact the effective part of the people at large, will render many troops quite unecessary. They will form a powerful check upon the regular troops, and will generally be sufficient to over-awe them.
Take all that you can of this book upon reason, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a happier man. (When a skeptic expressed surprise to see him reading a Bible)
Colonialism bred an innate arrogance, but when you undertake that sort of imperial adventure, that arrogance gives way to a feeling of accommodativeness. You take pride in your openness.
Once you have grace," I said to him, "you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do. But once you have grace, you are free. When you are baptized, there is no power in existence that can force you to commit a sin-nothing that will be able to drive you to it against your own conscience. And if you merely will it, you will be free forever, because the strength will be given you, as much as you need, and as often as you ask, and as soon as you ask, and generally long before you ask for it, too.
You might ask yourself why you want to surprise your readers in the first place. A surprise ending is sort of like a surprise party. Probably some people, somewhere, enjoy having friends and trusted colleagues lunge at them in the sudden blinding light of their own living room, but I don't think most of us do.
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