“The drives were nature’s first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world’s obstacles to them.”
#126
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)
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James Richardson 89
American poet 1950Related quotes
“Don't go around thinking the world owes you a living. It was here first.”
Misattributed
Variant: Don’t believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Source: Often attributed to Twain, but sourced to Robert J. Burdette, Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/06/world-owes/
Source: The Museum of Modern Art with Ron Rosenbaum http://www.errolmorris.com/content/interview/moma1999.html
Introduction, Sec. 1
De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book VII
“At first first nothing will happen to us
and later on
it will happen to us again.”
Variant: first of all nothing will happen
and a little later
nothing will happen again
Source: Book of Longing
Source: EU referendum: Corbyn tells activists 'I did all I could' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36628305 BBC News (25 June 2016)
Quoted as the opening passage of "BOOK ONE: The Functions of Language" in Language in Thought and Action (1949) by S. I. Hayakawa, p. 3
Words and Their Meanings (1940)
Context: A great deal of attention has been paid … to the technical languages in which men of science do their specialized thinking … But the colloquial usages of everyday speech, the literary and philosophical dialects in which men do their thinking about the problems of morals, politics, religion and psychology — these have been strangely neglected. We talk about "mere matters of words" in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.
This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect — but not in the way that magicians supposed, and not on the objects they were trying to influence. Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them. "A mere matter of words," we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently use to discuss ourselves and the world around us.
