
“4702. The Passions are like Fire and Water; good Servants, but bad Masters.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Bk. II, ch. 9.
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
“4702. The Passions are like Fire and Water; good Servants, but bad Masters.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Money is in some respects like fire; it is a very excellent servant but a terrible master.”
Ch. 3: "Avoid Debt" http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/barnum/moneygetting/moneygetting_chap4.html
Art of Money Getting (1880)
The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. Verulam Viscount St. Albans (1625), Of Marriage and Single Life
“Before all masters, necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.”
La nécessité est, d’ailleurs, de tous les maîtres, celui qu’on écoute le plus et qui enseigne le mieux.
Part I, ch. XVII
The Mysterious Island (1874)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, letter to Count Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels (Aug. 14, 1683) in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe (1923-) II.ii. p. 535, as translated by Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (2006) pp. 228-229.
Context: Regarding Spinoza, whom M. Arnauld has called the most impious and most dangerous man of this century, he was truly an Atheist, [i. e., ] he allowed absolutely no Providence dispensing rewards and punishments according to justice.... The God he puts on parade is not like ours; he has no intellect or will.... He fell well short of mastering the art of demonstration; he had only a mediocre knowledge of analysis and geometry; what he knew best was to make lenses for microscopes.
Attributed to "The First President of the United States" in "Liberty and Government" by W. M., in The Christian Science Journal, Vol. XX, No. 8 (November 1902) edited by Mary Baker Eddy, p. 465; no earlier or original source for this statement is cited; later quoted in The Cry for Justice : An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest (1915) edited by Upton Sinclair, p. 305, from which it became far more widely quoted and in Frank J. Wilstach, A Dictionary of Similes, 2d ed., p. 526 (1924). In The Great Thoughts (1985), George Seldes says, p. 441, col. 2, footnote, this paragraph “although credited to the ‘Farewell’ [address] cannot be found in it. Lawson Hamblin, who owns a facsimile, and Horace Peck, America’s foremost authority on quotations, informed me this paragraph is apocryphal.” It is listed as spurious at the Mount Vernon website http://www.mountvernon.org/research-collections/digital-encyclopedia/article/spurious-quotations/
Unsourced variant : Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Misattributed, Spurious attributions
Variant: Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.
Source: Sandman Slim