On the Wisdom of America (1950), p. 155
“I never had to choose my subject- my subject rather chose me.”
“For maturity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather than have a subjective success.”
Source: The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912), Ch. XII : The Will as a Maker of Truth, p. 140.
Context: For maturity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather than have a subjective success. We as mature persons can worship only that which we are compelled to worship. If we are offered a man-made God and a self-answering prayer, we will rather have no God and no prayer. There can be no valid worship except that in which man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the Most Real, beyond his will.
“Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.”
Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
Context: An ancient author tells us somewhere, with the tone of a pedagogue, if you have not done anything worthy of being recorded, at least write something worthy of being read. It is a precept as beautiful as a diamond of the first water cut in England, but it cannot be applied to me, because I have not written either a novel, or the life of an illustrious character. Worthy or not, my life is my subject, and my subject is my life. I have lived without dreaming that I should ever take a fancy to write the history of my life, and, for that very reason, my Memoirs may claim from the reader an interest and a sympathy which they would not have obtained, had I always entertained the design to write them in my old age, and, still more, to publish them.
quoted by Floyd Goodrich, in Edward Hopper, H. Abrams, New York 1971
1941 - 1967
“It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.”
Hawthorne and His Mosses (1850)
“If you eliminate all the words of a subject, you have eliminated the subject.”
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: As one learns the language of a subject, one is also learning what the subject is.... what we call a subject consists mostly, if not entirely, of its language. If you eliminate all the words of a subject, you have eliminated the subject.
A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 1017
