“Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that the mind was the disposer and cause of all… and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both.”
Plato, Phaedo
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Socrates 168
classical Greek Athenian philosopher -470–-399 BCRelated quotes
Corey's Coming
Song lyrics, On the Road to Kingdom Come (1976)
"V. S. Pritchett: Midnight Oil," p. 227
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.
To a Lady, Offended by a Sportive Observation
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 106.
<span title="New York Public Library card required, can be requested online at http://nypl.org">"The Ten-Hour Week is Here to Stay,"</span> http://search.proquest.com.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/hnpguardianobserver/docview/476248113/fulltextPDF/2EA0FBE19E60470DPQ/1 from The Observer (London, January 19, 1975 http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/guardian/doc/476248113.html)