
Major Richard Sharpe (describing his murdered wife, Teresa Moreno) p. 339
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Enemy (1984)
Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 96 (p. 348)
Major Richard Sharpe (describing his murdered wife, Teresa Moreno) p. 339
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Enemy (1984)
Addressing fans at Three Rivers Stadium on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in "Pirates, Puerto Rico Pay Clemente Honors" http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/12807951/ by Vito Stellino (UPI), in The El Paso Herald-Post (July 25, 1970)
Other, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>
“For it had been better for men to be born dumb and devoid of reason than to turn the gifts of providence to their mutual destruction.”
Mutos enim nasci et egere omni ratione satius fuisset quam providentiae munera in mutuam perniciem convertere.
Book XII, Chapter I, 2; translation by H. E. Butler
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)
“The gift of self cannot be given to us. It is an incomparable gift that has already been given.”
Source: Give Me Liberty! (1998), Ch. 9 : Empowering the Self, p. 118
Context: The gift of self cannot be given to us. It is an incomparable gift that has already been given. We have possessed it from the beginning.
In this whole business I follow the steps of Augustine.
De causa Dei contra Pelagium
“Hearts are not to be had as a gift, hearts are to be earned.”
Commonly quoted on the internet, and also in recent books such as Planetary Survival Manual by Matthew Stein (2000), p. 51.
Stein's book is the earliest published source located with that precise version of the quote, but the quote can be found in earlier Usenet posts such as this one from 1995 http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.ascii/msg/d9f6ec3887950a0d?hl=en, and other published variants of the quote using the words "sacred gift" can be found earlier. A Google Books search http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=%22sacred+gift%22+einstein with the date range restricted to 1900-1990 shows only a handful in the 1980s and 1970s, and several of them attribute it to The Metaphoric Mind by Bob Samples (1976), which also seems to be the earliest published variant. Samples does not provide an exact quote, but writes on p. 26: "Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine." It seems as if the last sentence about worshipping the servant is just Samples' own comment (though in later variants it became part of the supposed quote), while the earlier sentences only paraphrase something that Samples claims Einstein to have said. Einstein had many quotes about the value of intuition and imagination, but the specific word "gift" can be found in a comment remembered by János Plesch in the section Attributed in posthumous publications, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." So, Bob Samples might have been paraphrasing that comment. Likewise Einstein had a number of quotes about the intellect being secondary to intuition, but the language of the intellect "serving" can be found in a quote from the Out of My Later Years (1950) section, "And certainly we should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot lead, it can only serve; and it is not fastidious in its choice of a leader."
Misattributed