“Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.”

Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 10

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading." by Sarah Orne Jewett?
Sarah Orne Jewett photo
Sarah Orne Jewett 21
American novelist, short story writer and poet 1849–1909

Related quotes

François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“It is difficult to define love. In the soul it is a passion to rule; in the mind it is sympathy; and in the body it is only a hidden and tactful desire to possess what we love after many mysteries.”

Il est difficile de définir l'amour. Dans l'âme c'est une passion de régner, dans les esprits c'est une sympathie, et dans le corps ce n'est qu'une envie cachée et délicate de posséder ce que l'on aime après beaucoup de mystères.
Maxim 68.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Ja'far al-Sadiq photo

“The believers have four signs: good humor, tactfulness, kind heartedness and openhandedness”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Muhammad al-Hur al-Aamili, Wasā'il al-Shī‘ah, vol.6, p. 321
Religous Wisdom

Richelle Mead photo
Aeschylus photo

“For Hades, ruler of the nether sphere,
Exactest auditor of human kind,
Graved on the tablet of his mind
Doth every trespass read.”

Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Eumenides, lines 273–275 (tr. Anna Swanwick)

Richard Leakey photo

“I'm known for speaking my mind, a trait I probably inherited from my parents, Louis and Mary Leakey—neither of whom was renowned for tact.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001) with Virginia Morell

Jonathan Franzen photo
Patri Friedman photo
Marcus Tullius Cicero photo
Albert Einstein photo

“Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking,”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

1930s, Wisehart interview (1930)
Context: Much reading after a certain age diverts the mind from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking, just as the man who spends too much time in the theaters is apt to be content with living vicariously instead of living his own life.

Related topics