"First Meeting"
To My Daughters, With Love (1967)
Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence
“What occasion had you to praise me? praise is often hurtful to those on whom it is bestowed.”
Letter IV : Heloise to Abelard
Letters of Abelard and Heloise
Context: What occasion had you to praise me? praise is often hurtful to those on whom it is bestowed. A secret vanity springs up in the heart, blinds us, and conceals from us wounds that are ill cured. A seducer flatters us, and at the same time, aims at our destruction. A sincere friend disguises nothing from us, and from passing a light hand over the wound, makes us feel it the more intensely, by applying remedies. Why do you not deal after this manner with me? Will you be esteemed a base dangerous flatterer; or, if you chance to see any thing commendable in me, have you no fear that vanity, which is so natural to all women, should quite efface it? but let us not judge of virtue by outward appearances, for then the reprobates as well as the elect may lay claim to it. An artful impostor may, by his address gain more admiration than the true zeal of a saint.
“It is vain to apportion praise and blame.”
The Second Sex (1949)
Context: It is vain to apportion praise and blame. The truth is that if the vicious circle is so hard to break, it is because the two sexes are each the victim at once of the other and of itself. Between two adversaries confronting each other in their pure liberty, an agreement could be easily reached: the more so as the war profits neither. But the complexity of the whole affair derives from the fact that each camp is giving aid and comfort to the enemy; woman is pursuing a dream of submission, man a dream of identification. Want of authenticity does not pay: each blames the other for the unhappiness he or she has incurred in yielding to the temptations of the easy way; what man and woman loathe in each other is the shattering frustration of each one's own bad faith and baseness.
As quoted in "Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart dead at 89" at CNN (2 July 1997)
“…in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame…”
“On Preparing to Read Kipling”, p. 135
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)
“Thus neither the praise nor the blame is our own.”
"From a Letter to the Rev. Mr. Newton", line 21. (1782).
“I like to praise and reward loudly, to blame quietly.”
As quoted in The Historians' History of the World (1904) by Henry Smith Williams, p. 423
As quoted in The Affairs of Women: A Modern Miscellany (2006) by Colin Bingham, p. 367
Variant: I praise loudly. I blame softly.
“To govern the state by law is to praise the right and blame the wrong.”
from "Having Regulations—A Memorandum" in The Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Volume I, Arthur Probsthain, London, 1939. Translated by W.K. Liao.
