Lutetia; or, Paris. From the Augsberg Gazette, 12, VII (1842)
“How many things would you attempt
If you knew you could not fail”
“Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.”
Variant: Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.
Source: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Ch. 11, Finds Print of Man's Foot on the Sand.
“A true artist never portrays to please, but to show.”
Part I, Ch. 2 : The Evanescence of Evil, § 1
Social Statics (1851)
Context: All evil results from the non-adaptation of constitution to conditions. This is true of everything that lives. Does a shrub dwindle in poor soil, or become sickly when deprived of light, or die outright if removed to a cold climate? it is because the harmony between its organization and its circumstances has been destroyed.
Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy
“Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”
Source: The Agony and the Ecstasy
“Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.”
“I'm not basically a happy person, but I have all kinds of joy.”
“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.”
Source: A Case of Identity
“No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.”
Source: A Study in Scarlet
“All that I know I learned after I was thirty.”
As quoted in And Madly Teach : A Layman Looks at Public School Education (1949) by Mortimer Brewster Smith, p. 27
Post-Prime Ministerial
Conversation with Jean Martet (18 December 1927), Ch. 11, p. 167.
Clemenceau, The Events of His Life (1930)
Context: A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.
“Nothing great in the world was accomplished without passion.”
Often abbreviated to: Nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
Variant translation: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without enthusiasm.
Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832), Volume 1
Variant: We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.
Context: We assert then that nothing has been accomplished without interest on the part of the actors; and — if interest be called passion, inasmuch as the whole individuality, to the neglect of all other actual or possible interests and claims, is devoted to an object with every fibre of volition, concentrating all its desires and powers upon it — we may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the World has been accomplished without passion.
