“Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.”
Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 39
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W. Somerset Maugham 158
British playwright, novelist, short story writer 1874–1965Related quotes
“It is not great men who change the world, but weak men in the hands of a great God.”
Source: The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun
Part I : The History of Opinions Relating to Jesus Christ, Introduction
An History of the Corruptions of Christianity (1782)
Context: The unity of God is a doctrine on which the greatest stress is laid in the whole system of revelation. To guard this most important article was the principal object of the Jewish religion; and, notwithstanding the proneness of the Jews to idolatry, at length it fully answered its purpose in reclaiming them, and in impressing the minds of many persons of other nations in favour of the same fundamental truth.
The Jews were taught by their prophets to expect a Messiah, who was to be descended from the tribe of Judah, and the family of David, — a person in whom themselves and all the nations of the earth should be blessed; but none of their prophets gave them an idea of any other than a man like themselves in that illustrious character, and no other did they ever expect, or do they expect to this day.
Jesus Christ, whose history answers to the description given of the Messiah by the prophets, made no other pretensions; referring all his extraordinary power to God, his Father, who, he expressly says, spake and acted by him, and who raised him from the dead: and it is most evident that the apostles, and all those who conversed with our Lord before and after his resurrection, considered him in no other light than simply as "a man approved of God, by wonders and signs which God did by him."
“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.”
Though sometimes misattributed to Chesterton, this is generally attributed to Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, with the first publication of this yet located is in a section of proverbs called "Diamond Dust" in Eliza Cook's Journal, No. 98 (15 March 1851), with the first attribution to Chesterfield as yet located in: Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862) edited by Henry Southgate.
Misattributed
“A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.”
Generally attributed to Lord Chesterfield, the first publication of this yet located is in a section of proverbs called "Diamond Dust" in Eliza Cook's Journal, No. 98 (15 March 1851), with the first attribution to Chesterfield as yet located in: Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862) edited by Henry Southgate
Disputed
Present State of the Law (February 7, 1828).
Variant: In my mind, he was guilty of no error, he was chargeable with no exaggeration, he was betrayed by his fancy into no metaphor, who once said, that all we see about us, Kings, Lords, and Commons, the whole machinery of the State, all the apparatus of the system, and its varied workings, end in simply bringing twelve good men into a box.
Source: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), p. 278-279
Book XXIX, line 1
Translations, Orlando Furioso of Ludovico Ariosto (1773)
O degli uomini inferma e instabil mente!
Come siàn presti a variar disegno!
Tutti i pensier mutamo facilmente,
Più quei che nascon d’amoroso sdegno.
Canto XXIX, stanza 1 (tr. J. Hoole)
Orlando Furioso (1532)
