“You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!”

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), ch. 20

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "You calculated how to be uncalculating, and are natural by art!" by Thomas Hardy?
Thomas Hardy photo
Thomas Hardy 171
English novelist and poet 1840–1928

Related quotes

Ralph Waldo Emerson photo

“Nature hates calculators.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet
Gustave Flaubert photo

“You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

14 June 1853
Correspondence, Letters to Madame Louise Colet

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 128

Alexander Herrmann photo

“There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature.”

Alexander Herrmann (1844–1896) French magician

The Art of Magic (1891)
Context: No one regards the magician today as other than an ordinary man gifted with no extraordinary powers. The spectators come, not to be impressed with awe, but fully aware that his causes and effects are natural. They come rather as a guessing committee, to spy out the methods with which he mystifies. Hundreds of eyes are upon him. Men with more knowledge of the sciences than he come to trip and expose him, and to baffle their scrutiny is the study of his life. Long years of training and exercise alone will not make a magician. … There must be some natural aptitude for the art; it must be born in a man, and can never be acquired by rule. He must be alert both in body and in mind; cool and calculating to the movement of a muscle under all circumstances; a close student of men and human nature. To these qualifications he must add the rather incongruous quality of a mind turning on contradictions. With a scientific cause he must produce a seemingly opposite effect to that warranted by order and system.
I know of no life requiring such a series of opposite qualities as the magician's. And after the exercise of all these qualities I have named, resulting in the production of the most startling and novel results, the magician has not the satisfaction, like other men, of the enjoyment of his own product. He must be prepared to see it copied by others, or after a short time discovered by the public.

Ernestine Rose photo
Baron d'Holbach photo

“Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.”

Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist

La Système de la nature; quoted in The Law of Reason, published by J. Thompson, p. 40.
Variant: Now, if the ignorance of nature gave birth to Gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

Marshall McLuhan photo

“The great sixteenth century divorce between art and science came with accelerated calculators.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 205

Joseph Kosuth photo
Paul Gauguin photo

“Don't copy nature too closely. Art is an abstraction; as you dream amide nature, extrapolate art from it and concentrate on what you will create as a result.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

Source: 1870s - 1880s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 5 & 22: Gauguin is advising a fellow painter, 1885

Philip James Bailey photo

“Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.”

Proem
Festus (1839)

Related topics