Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)
“What is liberal education,” p. 8
Liberalism Ancient and Modern (1968)
“Honesty" "Accuracy" is just "Popular Opinion.”
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)
“The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.”
The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: A fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the mind of its composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to another of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is a wild dance, with a terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but as yet restraining her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
I will go farther. The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding — the power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.
“Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it.”
Source: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets (2004, 2008), Ch. 7, p. 125
Context: Contrary to popular opinion, mathematics is about simplifying life, not complicating it. A child learns a bag of candies can be shared fairly by counting them out: That is numeracy. She abstracts that notion to dividing a candy bar into equal pieces: arithmetic. Then, she learns how to calculate how much cocoa and sugar she will need to make enough chocolate for fifteen friends: algebra.
“[A]n attractive lie is always going to be more popular than a hard truth.”
No. 11, p. 27
Following Cerebus (2004-)
“And it is long since I have learned to hold popular opinion of no value.”
Letter to Washington, 11 November 1794
Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 18.
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”
This is not a quote by Kerouac. It's a quote by CBS broadcaster Charles Kuralt who used to present a TV news segment called 'On the Road' (which is probably how the confusion arose). This particular statement by Kuralt was made in May 1996 to students of Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19960527&id=yf8yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=yQcGAAAAIBAJ&pg=3106,5606314
Misattributed
