“Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.”
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer
No. 87
Characteristics, in the manner of Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1823)
“No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are…”
The Epilogue : Which is the proper ending of all comedies; and heralds, it may be, an afterpiece.
The Cream of the Jest (1917)
Context: I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are...
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James Branch Cabell130
American author 1879–1958Related quotes
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Il faut aimer n'importe qui, n'importe quoi, n'importe comment, pourvu qu'on aime.
Les Idées de Madame Aubray (1867), Act I, sc. ii; translation from Louis Proal (trans. A. R. Allinson) Passion and Criminality (London: Imperial Press, 1905) p. 563.
