A Quote by Brooks Atkinson

Life is seldom as unendurable as, to judge by the facts, it logically ought to be.

Brooks Atkinson

Quote Topics

Facts Judge Life Life Is Ought Seldom Unendurable

Quote Author

Brooks Atkinson
American - Critic
November 28, 1894 - January 14, 1984

It is wrong for a man to say that he is certain of the objective truth of any proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what Agnosticism asserts; and, in my opinion, it is all that is essential to Agnosticism. That which Agnostics deny and repudiate, as immoral, is the contrary doctrine, that there are propositions which men ought to believe without logically satisfactory evidence; and that reprobation ought to attach to the profession of disbelief in such inadequately supported propositions.

Thomas Huxley

It is intellectually dishonest to look backwards with all the facts and judge the decisions that were made with almost none of the facts, or the facts that existed hidden in the normal cloud of endless speculation of what might happen.

Norm Coleman

It was not a mere man he was holding, but a giant; or a block of granite. The pull was unendurable. The pain unendurable.

James Ramsey Ullman

The basic science is not physics or mathematics but biology -- the study of life. We must learn to think both logically and bio-logically.

Edward Abbey

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

David Byrne

And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

Franz Wright

A theoretical system does not merely state facts which have been observed and that logically deducible relations to other facts which have also been observed.

Talcott Parsons

Chess is a very logical game and it is the man who can reason most logically and profoundly in it that ought to win.

Jose Raul Capablanca

For what is meant by saying that a government ought to educate the people? Why should they be educated? What is the education for? Clearly, to fit the people for social life - to make them good citizens. And who is to say what are good citizens? The government: there is no other judge. And who is to say how these good citizens may be made? The government: there is no other judge. Hence the proposition is convertible into this - a government ought to mold children into good citizens, using its own discretion in settling what a good citizen is and how the child may be molded into one.

Herbert Spencer

Proust is interested in minutiae because life, as he sees it, is seldom ever about things but about our impression of things, not about facts but about the interpretation of facts, not about one particular feeling but about a confluence of conflicting feelings. Everything is elusive in Proust because nothing is ever certain.

Andre Aciman

In every case, we ought to act that part towards another, which we would judge to be right in him to act toward us, if we were in his circumstances and he in ours; or more generally - What we approve in others, that we ought to practise in like circumstances, what we condemn in others we ought not to do.

Thomas Reid

Your life is not going to be easy, and it should not be easy. It ought to be hard. It ought to be radical; it ought to be restless; it ought to lead you to places you'd rather not go.

Henri Nouwen

[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.

Robert Watson-Watt

The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. The facts: nothing matters but the facts: worship of the facts leads to everything, to happiness first of all and then to wealth.

Edmond de Goncourt

I entirely agree that a historian ought to be precise in detail; but unless you take all the characters and circumstances into account, you are reckoning without the facts. The proportions and relations of things are just as much facts as the things themselves.