“Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
Thomas Edison’s “much quoted statement” quoted by his son Charles in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“The examined life is no great shakes either”.
Another from me, on December 10 2021, prompted by entering the April 1 Socrates quotation into the relevant digital file
“This is a bull who carries his own china shop around with him.”
Allan Fotheringham in Ottawa Sun October 29, 1999 (re Bill Vander Zalm, and with justice, but it is true of a great many others and not just politicians)
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates, quoted in Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (and about 10 million other places)
“The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion, when no one else is watching.”
“Anson Dorrance (1951-), coach of women’s soccer at the University of North Carolina” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail October 27, 2011
“something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room…. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.”
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
“Of all political ideals, that of making people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls.”
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2
“Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?”
The main character in Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt