Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
“There are a great many obscene minds, yet more railing and satirical, but very few fastidious ones. A man must have good manners, be very polite, and even have a great deal of originality to be able to jest gracefully and be felicitous in his remarks about trifles; to jest in such a manner and to make something out of nothing is to create.”
—
Jean de La Bruyère
,
book
Les Caractères
4
Les Caractères (1688), De la société et de la conversation
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Jean de La Bruyère 65
17th-century French writer and philosopher 1645–1696Related quotes
Ted Hughes
(1930–1998) English poet and children's writer
The Paris Review interview
Context: Many writers write a great deal, but very few write more than a very little of the real thing. So most writing must be displaced activity. When cockerels confront each other and daren’t fight, they busily start pecking imaginary grains off to the side. That’s displaced activity. Much of what we do at any level is a bit like that, I fancy. But hard to know which is which. On the other hand, the machinery has to be kept running. The big problem for those who write verse is keeping the machine running without simply exercising evasion of the real confrontation. If Ulanova, the ballerina, missed one day of practice, she couldn’t get back to peak fitness without a week of hard work. Dickens said the same about his writing—if he missed a day he needed a week of hard slog to get back into the flow.
Comme c’est le caractère des grands esprits de faire entendre en peu de paroles beaucoup de choses, les petits esprits au contraire ont le don de beaucoup parler, et de ne rien dire.
Maxim 142.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Stanislaw Ulam
(1909–1984) Polish-American mathematician
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(1909–2005) American business consultant
Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 303
Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 15, “Probably a blind alley—”, p. 147
Context: Well, in the first place an armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life. For me, politeness is a sine qua non of civilization. That’s a personal evaluation only. But gunfighting has a strong biological use. We do not have enough things to kill off the weak and the stupid these days. But to stay alive as an armed citizen a man has to be either quick with his wits or with his hands, preferably both. It’s a good thing.
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(1613–1680) French author of maxims and memoirs
Reflections on Various Subjects (1665–1678), II. On Difference of Character