“We are firm believers in the maxim that for all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.”
Goethe.
1820s, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827–1855)
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Thomas Carlyle481
Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian… 1795–1881Related quotes
“The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one.”
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist
Lectures to Young Men: On Various Important Subjects (1856) Lecture IV : Portrait Gallery
Miscellany
Context: The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game. The cynic puts all human actions into two classes — openly bad and secretly bad.
“The scoundrel has his good qualities, and the good man his weaknesses.”
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos book Les Liaisons dangereuses
Le scélérat a ses vertus, comme l'honnête homme a ses faiblesses. <br class="br">Letter 32: Madame de Volanges to Madame la Présidente Tourvel. Trans. P.W.K. Stone (1961). http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Liaisons_dangereuses_-_Lettre_32 <br class="br">Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)
Edward Norris Kirk (1802–1874) American Christian missionary, pastor, teacher, evangelist and writer
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 271.
Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist
1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet
http://books.google.com/books?id=eRwwAAAAMAAJ&q="The+two+maxims+of+any+great+man+at+court+are+always+to+keep+his+countenance+and+never+to+keep+his+word"&pg=PA262#v=onepage
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
“Optimism is the harmony between man's spirit and the spirit of God pronouncing His works good.”
Helen Keller book Optimism
Optimism (1903)
Context: I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God's world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good. I believe we should so act that we may draw nearer and more near the age when no man shall live at his ease while another suffers. These are the articles of my faith, and there is yet another on which all depends — to bear this faith above every tempest which overfloods it, and to make it a principal in disaster and through affliction. Optimism is the harmony between man's spirit and the spirit of God pronouncing His works good.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Sunday