Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) Italian scholar and poet
As quoted in "Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia" (1962) by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 75
“A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.”
Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 5
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H. Havelock Ellis31
British physician, writer, and social reformer 1859–1939Related quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche book On the Genealogy of Morality
Essay 3, Aphorism 16
On the Genealogy of Morality (1887)
“A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.”
Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) Swedish chemist, innovator, and armaments manufacturer
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
Francis Bacon book Essays
Essays (1625)
Context: Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
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George Henry Lewes (1817–1878) British philosopher
The Principles of Success in Literature (1865)
Context: A man must be himself convinced if he is to convince others. The prophet must be his own disciple, or he will make none. Enthusiasm is contagious: belief creates belief. There is no influence issuing from unbelief or from languid acquiescence. This is peculiarly noticeable in Art, because Art depends on sympathy for its influence, and unless the artist has felt the emotions he depicts we remain unmoved: in proportion to the depth of his feeling is our sympathetic response; in proportion to the shallowness or falsehood of his presentation is our coldness or indifference.
George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.
Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician
To Liberal leader of the time Walter Tucker, quoted "Star Phoenix" July 14 1947.
“It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man;”
David Brewster (1781–1868) British astronomer and mathematician
The facts and fancies of Mr. Darwin (1862)
Context: It is a more rational belief that man may become a brute than that a brute may become a man; and it is an easier faith that plants and animals may dwindle down into an elemental atom, than that this atom should embrace in its organization, and evolve, all the noble forms of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life.