“First we feel. Then we fall.”

— James Joyce , book Finnegans Wake

Source: Finnegans Wake

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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James Joyce 191

Irish novelist and poet 1882–1941

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Love

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

“First, we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Cardinal Francis Spellman used this attribution in his speech to the 1954 National Convention of the American Legion. It has been debunked repeatedly, for example in They Never Said It (1999) by Paul F. Boller and John H. George. The last two sentences have also been misattributed to Nikita Krushchev. The metaphor of the ripe fruit appears much earlier in US policy discussions about Cuba:
If an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can only gravitate towards the North American Union.
John Quincy Adams, letter to Hugh Nelson (28 April 1823)
The fruit will fall into our hands when it is ripe, without an officious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours … in due season, without the wicked impertinence of war.
Parke Godwin, "Annexation" (February 1854)
Misattributed

“When we put God first, all other things fall into their proper place or drop out of our lives.”

Ezra Taft Benson (1899–1994) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

“In obedience to the feeling of reality, we shall insist that, in the analysis of propositions, nothing "unreal" is to be admitted. But, after all, if there is nothing unreal, how, it may be asked, could we admit anything unreal? The reply is that, in dealing with propositions, we are dealing in the first instance with symbols, and if we attribute significance to groups of symbols which have no significance, we shall fall into the error of admitting unrealities, in the only sense in which this is possible, namely, as objects described.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Ch. 16: Descriptions

“Perhaps it is our fear, that in the silence between stories, in the moment of falling, the fear that we will never find the one story which will save us, and so we lunge for another, and we feel safe again, if only for as long as we are telling it.”

Nick Flynn (1960) American writer

“Is it always permissible to speak of the extension of a concept, of a class? And if not, how do we recognize the exceptional cases? Can we always infer from the extension of one concept's coinciding with that of a second, that every object which falls under the first concept also falls under the second?”

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) mathematician, logician, philosopher

Vol. 2, p. 127. Replying to Bertrand Russell's letter about Russell's Paradox; quoted in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russell-paradox/
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903

“Accordingly, the first essential is that those feelings should prevail with us that we wish to prevail with the judge, and that we should be moved ourselves before we attempt to move others.”
Primum est igitur ut apud nos valeant ea quae valere apud iudicem volumus, adficiamurque antequam adficere conemur.

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book VI, Chapter II, 28; translation by H. E. Butler
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

“We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last to be able to do anything about it.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

Barack Obama during the Climate change summit in New York, as quoted in The Guardians article Climate change summit: Julie Bishop commends Australia’s emission targets by Helen Davidson (24 September 2014) http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/24/climate-change-summit-julie-bishop-commends-australias-emission-targets
2014

“First we feel. Then we fall.”

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James Joyce 191

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