“What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.”
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher
Source: Degrees of Knowledge (1932, Notre Dame Translation), p. 4.
Book I (1668), Dedication "To Monseigneur the Dauphin".
Fables (1668–1679)
“What we need is not truths that serve us but a truth we may serve.”
Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher
Source: Degrees of Knowledge (1932, Notre Dame Translation), p. 4.
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Slow Train Coming (1979), Gotta Serve Somebody
Variant: It may be the Devil or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.
“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’s minds may take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”
Quidquid praecipies, esto brevis, ut cito dicta
percipiant animi dociles teneantque fideles:
omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat.
Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Lines 335–337; Edward Charles Wickham translation
Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) Chinese physician, politician and revolutionary
China as a Heap of Loose Sand (1924)
Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar
Source: Ideas have Consequences (1948), p. 73.