“Those writers who lay on the watch for novelty, could have little hope of greatness; for great things cannot have escaped former observation.”
The Life of Cowley
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
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Samuel Johnson362
English writer 1709–1784Related quotes
“Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
Francis Bacon book Novum Organum
Novum Organum (1620)
Context: Those who have taken upon them to lay down the law of nature as a thing already searched out and understood, whether they have spoken in simple assurance or professional affectation, have therein done philosophy and the sciences great injury. For as they have been successful in inducing belief, so they have been effective in quenching and stopping inquiry; and have done more harm by spoiling and putting an end to other men's efforts than good by their own. Those on the other hand who have taken a contrary course, and asserted that absolutely nothing can be known — whether it were from hatred of the ancient sophists, or from uncertainty and fluctuation of mind, or even from a kind of fullness of learning, that they fell upon this opinion — have certainly advanced reasons for it that are not to be despised; but yet they have neither started from true principles nor rested in the just conclusion, zeal and affectation having carried them much too far....
Now my method, though hard to practice, is easy to explain; and it is this. I propose to establish progressive stages of certainty. The evidence of the sense, helped and guarded by a certain process of correction, I retain. But the mental operation which follows the act of sense I for the most part reject; and instead of it I open and lay out a new and certain path for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from the simple sensuous perception.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Source: The Gay Science
Thomas Young (scientist) (1773–1829) English polymath
Preface
A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807)
“Those who apply themselves too much to little things often become incapable of great ones.”
François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Ceux qui s'appliquent trop aux petites choses deviennent ordinairement incapables des grandes.
Maxim 41.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn book The First Circle
Innokenty, in Ch. 57.
Variant translation: For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
The First Circle (1968)
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Source: 1930s, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (1935), Ch. 8: Western Civilisation
“All men who have achieved great things have been great dreamers.”
Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer