
The Art of Persuasion
Preface Introductory to the Following Treatise
The Sceptical Chymist (1661)
The Art of Persuasion
Source: Law in the Scientific Era, P.vii.
Nobel Lecture (8 December 1990)
Context: Only now have I understood that there was a secret relationship between what I have called my expulsion from the present and the writing of poetry. Poetry is in love with the instant and seeks to relive it in the poem, thus separating it from sequential time and turning it into a fixed present. But at that time I wrote without wondering why I was doing it. I was searching for the gateway to the present: I wanted to belong to my time and to my century. A little later this obsession became a fixed idea: I wanted to be a modern poet. My search for modernity had begun.
The Art of Persuasion
“Anything worth knowing cannot be understood by the human mind.”
Entry (1960)
Eric Hoffer and the Art of the Notebook (2005)
Context: Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things — have even discovered them over and over again — and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways.