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William Dean Howells 18
author, critic and playwright from the United States 1837–1920Related quotes
“Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be”
Book I, 1099b.22: Quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:8.
Nicomachean Ethics
Context: Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.
“Nature abhors imperfect work
And on it lays her ban;
And all creation must despise
A tailless man.”
Prehistoric Smith, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“…richness of heart of the poor people [and to despise] the poverty of heart of the rich.”
Baba Amte: A Vision of New India
“From that point
Dependent is the heaven and nature all.”
Canto XXVIII, lines 41–42 (tr. Longfellow).
The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1321), Paradiso
Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)
The Great Illusion (1910)
Context: The prosperity of a people depends upon such facts as the natural wealth of the country in which they live, their social discipline and industrial character, the result of generations, of centuries, it may be, of tradition. In addition it depends upon a special technical capacity for such-and-such a manufacture, a special aptitude for meeting the peculiarities of such-and-such a market, the efficient equipment of elaborately constructed workshops, and the existence of a population trained to given trades.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.</p