“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”
Source: Emma
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Jane Austen 477
English novelist 1775–1817Related quotes
“You can't do better than that.”
On being hugged by Pope John Paul II during the pontiff's visit to Detroit in 1987
Dolon, John (July 2007), "The White Stripes: New Jack City" http://www.blender.com/guide/articles.aspx?id=2705 Blender Volume unknown: pp. 109
2010
Source: 1970s, Take Today : The Executive as Dropout (1972), p. 109
“What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?”
The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Context: What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?
Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 12
Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He don’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
“Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.”
"Conversation with a Stone".
Poems New and Collected (1998), Salt (1962)
Context: No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what the sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.
