“New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
The Life of Pope
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
In this work are exhibited in a very high degree the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. ~ Samuel Johnson, "The Life of Alexander Pope" from Lives of the English Poets (1781) http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/lvpc10.txt <br class="br">Misattributed
“New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.”
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer
The Life of Pope
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
“Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.”
David Chalmers book The Conscious Mind
The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1996)
Jacques Bertin (1918–2010) French geographer and cartographer
Source: Semiology of graphics (1967/83), p. 44
Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations
§ 129
Philosophical Investigations (1953)
Context: The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something — because it is always before one's eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. — And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.
Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist
Source: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism
Source: 1840s, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions (1845), p. 48
“And Chaucer, with his infantine
Familiar clasp of things divine.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) English poet, author
A Vision of Poets (1844)