
“Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward.”
1880s, The Scholar in a Republic (1881)
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 566
Context: A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah! what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.
“Sit not, like the figure on our silver coin, looking ever backward.”
1880s, The Scholar in a Republic (1881)
“Nor is he the wisest man who never proved himself a fool.”
Stanza 124
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After (1886)
Ventures in Common Sense (1919), p87.
(1964) Post-election statement. Virginia Morell, Ancestral Passions: The leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings, Copyright 1995, Chapter 19, beginning.
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Often quoted as "Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.", e.g, Peter's Quotations : Ideas for Our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 112.
Faith for Living (1940)
“A brave man is one who admits his fear. Only a fool believes himself invincible.”
Source: Ripping Time (2000), Chapter 10 (p. 300)
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Touchstone, Act V, scene i
Source: As You Like It (1599–1600)
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
Touchstone, Act V, scene i
Misattributed
“A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself.”
Source: How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment