“Prithee don’t screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.”
Love's Last Shift, Act II, sc. i (1696).
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Colley Cibber 26
British poet laureate 1671–1757Related quotes
“Of Manners gentle, of Affections mild;
In Wit, a Man; Simplicity, a Child.”
"Epitaph on Gay" (1733), lines 1-2. Reported in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, sixth edition (Yale University Press, 1970), p. 818. Compare: "Her wit was more than man, her innocence a child", John Dryden, Elegy on Mrs. Killegrew, line 70.
Martin Landau: ‘Doubt Is Important’, Washington Times (December 25, 2016)
Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 10
Context: The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?
“Manner is all in all, whate'er is writ,
The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.”
Source: Table Talk (1782), Line 542.
“The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.”
Le plus grand défaut de la pénétration n'est pas de n'aller point jusqu'au but, c'est de le passer.
Variant translation: The greatest fault of a penetrating mind is not to fail to attain the mark but to go beyond it.
Maxim 377.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)