Source: Samson Agonistes (1671), Lines 1687-1692 & 1697-1707
Context: But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
[... ]
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 276
1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), New England Reformers
Letter to John Jay (23 August 1785); published in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (1953), edited by Julian P. Boyd, vol. 8, p. 426
1780s
The Second World War (1939–1945)
Source: Broadcast (21 March 1943), quoted in The Times (22 March 1943), p. 6
"Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 81.
“Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.”
Source: The Intelligent Investor (1973) (Fourth Revised Edition), Chapter 20, "Margin of Safety": The Central Concept, p. 286
Fortnightly Review (January 1877), p. 139
1870s
“Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.”
Reported in Louis Klopsch, ed., Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations From the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896), p. 195.
“Who seems most hideous when adorned the most.”
Che quant' era più ornata, era più brutta.
Canto XX, stanza 116 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Compare:
Beauty when most unclothed is clothed best.
Phineas Fletcher, Sicelides (1614), Act II, scene iv
In naked beauty more adorned,
More lovely than Pandora.
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674), Book IV, line 713
For Loveliness
Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,
But is, when unadorned, adorned the most.
James Thomson, The Seasons, "Autumn" (1730), line 204
Orlando Furioso (1532)
“When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.”
"Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke" (1958), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 108.
