“If everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture?”
Source: Parable of the Sower (1993), p. 115
“Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book.”
The Philosophy of Paine (1925)
Context: Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters — seldom in any school of writing.
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Thomas Edison 57
American inventor and businessman 1847–1931Related quotes
A xix
Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)
The Third Notebook: Part Two
No Longer Human
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.
“And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?”
Source: The Swan Thieves
Peter Greenaway
(1942) British film director
From the eighth book, "The Book of the Seducer"
The Pillow Book
Der Umgang mit Kindern hat für einen verständigen Menschen unendlich viel Interesse. Hier sieht er das Buch der Natur in unverfälschter Ausgabe aufgeschlagen.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)
“Everyone quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.”
Source: The Happy Prince
Northanger Abbey (1817)
Works, Northanger Abbey
“If a lion could speak, it would not understand itself.”
Michael Frayn
(1933) British writer
James Fenton (ed.) The Original Michael Frayn (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1983) p. 67.