
“Your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.”
The Maiden Queen, Act i, scene 2.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Section 4, member 1, subsection 2, Causes of Religious melancholy. From the Devil by miracles, apparitions, oracles. His instruments or factors, politicians, Priests, Impostors, Heretics, blind guides. In them simplicity, fear, blind zeal, ignorance, solitariness, curiosity, pride, vainglory, presumption, &c. his engines, fasting, solitariness, hope, fear, etc.
The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Part III
“Your ignorance is the mother of your devotion to me.”
The Maiden Queen, Act i, scene 2.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“For all that Nature by her mother-wit
Could frame in earth.”
Canto 10, stanza 21
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book IV
Of Heresies
Meditationes sacræ (1597)
Quoted in http://www.nypost.com/seven/09232007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/sympathy_from_the_devil.htm
2005, The World without Zionism, 2005
Of Sir Richard Jebb, Some Cambridge Dons of the Nineties (1956)
1950s
“You know, Gilan, sarcasm isn't the lowest form of wit. It's not even wit at all.”
“all ignorance toboggans into know
and trudges up to ignorance again”
Collected Poems (1963), p. 65
“Ideals of College” http://books.google.com/books?id=_VYEIml1cAkC&pg=PA15&dq=%22You+are+not+here+merely%22, Swarthmore (25 October 1913)<!--PWW 28:439-442-->
1910s
Context: You are not here merely to prepare to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.