Source: Collected Stories
“I don't think anything might have been. What is, is.”
“He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
Lectures on the English Poets http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16209/16209.txt (1818), Lecture I, "On Poetry in General"
Context: Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.
Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Odyssey (2006), Chapter 25 (p. 227)
“This is as much a part of my story as anything else. Friendship is love as much as any romance.”
This is the Truth! (1949)
Context: I was responsible only for Joe Jackson. I positively can't say that I recall anything out of the way in the Series. I mean, anything that might have turned the tide. There was just one thing that doesn't seem quite right, now that I think back over it. Cicotte seemed to let up on a pitch to Pat Duncan, and Pat hit it over my head. Duncan didn't have enough power to hit the ball that far, particularly if Cicotte had been bearing down. Williams was a great control pitcher and they made a lot of fuss over him walking a few men. Swede Risberg missed the bag on a double-play ball at second and they made a lot out of that. But those are things that might happen to anybody. You just can't say out and out that that was shady baseball.
Prenticeana http://books.google.com/books?id=4P0gAAAAMAAJ&q=%22SOME+people+seem+as+if+they+can+never+have+been+children+and+others+seem+as+if+they+could+never+be+any+thing+else%22&pg=PA100#v=onepage (1860)
“Attachment to spiritual things is… just as much an attachment as inordinate love of anything else.”
Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)
Misattributed
“For myself I am an optimist - it does not seem to be much use to be anything else.”
Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Guildhall, London (9 November 1954) The Unwritten Alliance, page 195, Columbia University, NY (1966),page 195,
Post-war years (1945–1955)
I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
Source: No Ordinary Genius (1994), p. 239, from interview in "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" (1981): video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEwUwWh5Xs4&t=48m10s
