“When a cat flatters… he is not insincere: you may safely take it for real kindness.”
Source: Imaginary Conversations
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Walter Savage Landor23
British writer 1775–1864Related quotes
Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer
Description of Life (Targ Editions, 1980)
Robert A. Heinlein book Tunnel in the Sky
Source: Tunnel in the Sky (1955), Chapter 2, “The Fifth Way” (p. 42)
Derek Prince (1915–2003) British missionary
Sigmund Freud book The Future of an Illusion
Variant: Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanor.
Source: 1920s, The Future of an Illusion (1927), Ch. 6
T.S. Eliot book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
The Naming of Cats
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt
Douglas Adams. The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time. New York: Random House, 2002, 135–136.<br>Also quoted by Richard Dawkins in his Eulogy for Douglas Adams (17 September 2001) http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html <br class="br">Context: If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.