Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 59
Context: He [Grotius] avoided another danger as serious as his precocity had been. He steered clear of the quicksands of useless scholarship, which had engulfed so many strong men of his time. The zeal of learned men in that period was largely given to knowing things not worth knowing, to discussing things not worth discussing, to proving things not worth proving. Grotius seemed plunging on, with all sails set, into these quicksands; but again his good sense and sober judgment saved him: he decided to bring himself into the current of active life flowing through his land and time, and with this purpose he gave himself to the broad and thorough study of jurisprudence.
“He was universally belov'd, Hospitable, Generous, Learned in many things, skill'd in Musick, a very greate Cherisher of Learned men of whom he had the conversation.”
May 26, 1703.
The Diary
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John Evelyn 5
writer, gardener and diarist 1620–1706Related quotes
“All the Traps of Earth” (p. 165); originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 1960
Short Fiction, Skirmish (1977)
Context: Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.
He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.
He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the flat galactic plane.
Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him — he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.
There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder — and no actual knowledge, either.
“He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.”
Source: The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt
“A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”
“Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing: that no emotion is the final one.”
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
Observations on the Trade with North america, Chart V, page 29.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition
“He who knows himself properly can very soon learn to know all other men. It is all reflection.”
G 8
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)