“What a man has, so much he is sure of.”
Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright
Variant: What a man has, so much he is sure of.
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 43.
Jämmerlich ist freilich jene praktische Philosophie der Franzosen und Engländer, von denen man meint, sie wüßten so gut, was der Mensch sei, unerachtet sie nicht darüber spekulierten, was er sein solle.
Cited in Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" (1798), § 355.
“What a man has, so much he is sure of.”
Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright
Variant: What a man has, so much he is sure of.
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 43.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian
The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)
Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon
Source: Flowers for Algernon (1966)
Context: No one really starts anything new, Mrs Nemur. Everyone builds on other men's failures. There is nothing really original in science. What each man contributes to the sum of knowledge is what counts.
Christian Nestell Bovee (1820–1904) American writer
Source: Intuitions and Summaries of Thought (1862), Volume II, p. 24.
“A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.”
Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity
P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist
Source: A New Model of the Universe (1932), p. 33
Context: Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. But where can such a philosophy be found? All that we know in our times by the name of philosophy is not philosophy, but merely "critical literature" or the expression of personal opinions, mainly with the aim of overthrowing and destroying other personal opinions. Or, which is still worse, philosophy is nothing but self-satisfied dialectic surrounding itself with an impenetrable barrier of terminology unintelligible to the uninitiated and solving for itself all the problems of the universe without any possibility of proving these explanations or making them intelligible to ordinary mortals.
Jules Dupré (1811–1889) French painter
Quote of Dupré, c 1844-45; as cited by Charles Sprague Smith, in Barbizon days, Millet-Corot-Rousseau-Barye publisher, A. Wessels Company, New York, July 1902, p. 164
Together, Dupré and Theodore Rousseau struggled in vain for five months of 1844 with the constant fathomless azure blue of the southern sky