
“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”
Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)
Les livres d'histoire qui ne mentent pas sont tout fort maussades.
La Bûche [The Log] (December 24, 1849)
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
Variant: History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
Les livres d'histoire qui ne mentent pas sont tout fort maussades.
The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard (1881)
“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”
Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)
as reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 29.
“A book in which there were no lies would be a curiosity.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
"Obituary: Tony Banks" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4591310.stm, BBC News, 9 January 2006.
comments on constituency work after standing down as an MP
Source: Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1940), p. 149
“A bottle of wine contains more philosophy than all the books in the world.”
The Mammoth Book of Zingers, Quips, and One-Liners (2004) by Geoff Tibballs
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: Of writing that is filled with mechanical and grammatical error, as compared with writing that conforms to the rules of standard edited English. Surely, we do not want to say that there is a necessary correlation between mechanical and editorial accuracy and intellectual substance. There are many books that are mechanically faultless but which contain untrue, unclear, or even nonsensical ideas. Carefully edited writing tells us, not that the writer speaks truly, but that he or she grasps... the manner in which knowledge is usually expressed. The most devastating argument against a paper that is marred by grammatical and rhetorical error is that the writer does not understand the subject.
“"Rationalism" is a historical concept that contains within itself a world of contradictions.”
Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism