“Direct your arrows at objects without being personal; come near your hearers. Letters dropped into the post-office without address go to the dead-letter office, and are of no use to any body.”

—  John Hall

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 479.

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 "Direct your arrows at objects without being personal; come near your hearers. Letters dropped into the post-office with…" by John Hall?
John Hall photo
John Hall 20
Presbyterian pastor from Northern Ireland in New York, died… 1829–1898

Related quotes

C.G. Jung photo

“We often dream about people from whom we receive a letter by the next post. I have ascertained on several occasions that at the moment when the dream occurred the letter was already lying in the post-office of the addressee.”

C.G. Jung book Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Source: Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Pope Benedict XVI photo

“Charity without faith is meaningless, and faith without charity remains a dead letter.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Quoted in Elise Harris, " Priest Swaps Clerical Hats with 'Sharp, Healthy' Benedict XVI http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/priest-swaps-clerical-hats-with-sharp-healthy-benedict-xvi", National Catholic Register (11 February 2013)
2013

Lewis Carroll photo

“If the Letter is to be in answer to another, begin by getting out that other letter and reading it through, in order to refresh your memory, as to what it is you have to answer, and as to your correspondent’s present address (otherwise you will be sending your letter to his regular address in London, though he has been careful in writing to give you his Torquay address in full).”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing (1890)

Charlaine Harris photo

“This letter is written on the skin of one of the water sprites who drowned your parents.'
'Ick!' I cried, and dropped the letter on the kitchen table.”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

“Letters are above all useful as a means of expressing the ideal self; and no other method of communication is quite so good for this purpose. In conversation, those uneasy eyes upon you, those lips ready with an emendation before you have begun to speak, are a powerful deterrent to unreality, even to hope. In art it is not often possible to make direct use of your dreams of tomorrow and your excuses for yesterday.In letters we can reform without practice, beg without humiliation, snip and shape embarrassing experiences to the measure of our own desires — this is a benevolent form. The ideal self expressed in letters is not a crudely sugary affair except in dreary personalities; in any case the ideal is very much a part of the character, having its twenty-four hours a day to get through, and being no less unique in its combinations than one's fingerprints.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Anderson, Millay and Crane in Their Letters" (p. 133)
American Fictions (1999)

Anton Chekhov photo

“She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …”

Anton Chekhov book The Lady with the Dog

Она много читала, не писала въ письмахъ ъ, …
The Lady with the Dog

Charles Dickens photo

“The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government. No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.”

Charles Dickens book Little Dorrit

Bk. I, Ch. 10
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)

Elizabeth Gilbert photo

“But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a letter arriving, being read in your presence, put away, not explained, or: "No, alas, I can't to-night" on the telephone — that, one person having set up without knowing, the other cannot undo without the where? who? why? that brings them both down a peg. Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.”

Elizabeth Bowen book The House in Paris

The House in Paris (1935)

Ulysses S. Grant photo

“It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Eighth State of the Union Address (1876)
Context: It was my fortune, or misfortune, to be called to the office of Chief Executive without any previous political training. From the age of 17 I had never even witnessed the excitement attending a Presidential campaign but twice antecedent to my own candidacy, and at but one of them was I eligible as a voter.
Under such circumstances it is but reasonable to suppose that errors of judgment must have occurred. Even had they not, differences of opinion between the Executive, bound by an oath to the strict performance of his duties, and writers and debaters must have arisen. It is not necessarily evidence of blunder on the part of the Executive because there are these differences of views. Mistakes have been made, as all can see and I admit...

Related topics