A Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren
The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech.
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Misquotations are the only quotations that are never misquoted.
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He's taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of his death from being a total surprise.
Some lines are born quotations, some are made quotations, and some have "quotation" thrust upon them.
In order to achieve a true understanding of string theory, some new idea will be required, and most likely, some break with the concepts on which we've traditionally based physical theory.
In the field of economics we maintain to this day some of the most primitive ideas, some of the most radically false ideas, some of the most absurd ideas a brain can hold. ... but all this give no uneasiness to the average brain. That long-suffering organ has been trained for more thousands of years than history can uncover to hold in unquestioning patience great blocks of irrelevant idiocy and large active lies.
The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.
For if as scientists we seek simplicity, then obviously we try the simplest surviving theory first, and retreat from it only when it proves false. Not this course, but any other, requires explanation. If you want to go somewhere quickly, and several alternate routes are equally likely to be open, no one asks why you take the shortest. The simplest theory is to be chosen not because it is the most likely to be true but because it is scientifically the most rewarding among equally likely alternatives. We aim at simplicity and hope for truth.
But that is the way of the place: down our many twisting corridors, one encounters story after story, some heroic, some villainous, some true, some false, some funny, some tragic, and all of them combining to form the mystical, undefinable entity we call the school. Not exactly the building, not exactly the faculty or the students or the alumni - more than all those things but also less, a paradox, an order, a mystery, a monster, an utter joy.
In the garden of literature, the highest and the most charismatic flowers are always the quotations.
President Obama will go down as having passed some of the most historic bills in the history of this country.
Many, if not most, of the best and most lasting children’s books have multiple levels, some of which are not fully accessible to their most likely readers…at least, not on their first read-through at age eight or ten or fifteen.
Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.
To take, for example, my own death: what I consider most likely to be true is that death will be the complete and utter end of my existence, with no successor existence of any kind that can be related to me as I now am. And if that is not the case, the next most likely scenario, it seems to me, is something along the lines indicated by Schopenhauer. But neither of these is what I most want. What I want to be true is that I have an individual, innermost self, a soul, which is the real me and which survives my death. That too could be true. But alas, I do not believe it.
...if a child waited to speak until all the grown-ups settled down and gave her some room to say her piece, the most important things would never get said.
Forty to 60 I would say is your prime. That's when you know the most, you've seen the most, you understand the most, and you still have some physical energy.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.
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