“5185. To hit the Nail on the Head.”

—  Thomas Fuller (writer)

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "5185. To hit the Nail on the Head." by Thomas Fuller (writer)?
Thomas Fuller (writer) photo
Thomas Fuller (writer)420
British physician, preacher, and intellectual 1654–1734

Related quotes

Francois Rabelais photo

“You have there hit the nail on the head.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Third Book (1546), Chapter 34.

Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“There are terrible people who, instead of solving a problem, bungle it and make it more difficult for all who come after. Whoever can't hit the nail on the head should, please, not hit at all.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Bill Mollison photo

“You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 2.2

“A contact sheet is so interesting, because you see how a photographer thinks. He comes closer and closer to a subject, corrects it, looks at it again, and then with tiny movements turns around until it is in exactly the right and exact relation to him. Contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail into a plank. First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: Interviews and Conversations, 1951-1998, Conversation. Interview with Byron Dobell (1957), p. 37

Mikhail Gorbachev photo

“Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads.”

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in TIME magazine (9 September 1985)
Context: Certain people in the United States are driving nails into this structure of our relationship, then cutting off the heads. So the Soviets must use their teeth to pull them out.

Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki photo

“The seekers on the path of God are a community who are overwhelmed in the ocean of love from head to nail of the foot.”

Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki (1173–1235) Indian Sufi

Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 264

“During campus protests of the 1960s, Sidney Morgenbesser was hit on the head by police. When asked whether he had been treated unfairly or unjustly, he responded that it was "unjust, but not unfair. It was unjust because they hit me over the head, but not unfair because they hit everyone else over the head.””

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

The Independent, The Independent, Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Philosopher celebrated for his withering New York Jewish humour http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sidney-morgenbesser-550224.html, 6 August 2004. Obituaries – Sidney Morgenbesser, 82, Kibitzing Philosopher, Dies http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/04/obituaries/04morgenbesser.html. The New York Times (September 8, 2004). Some of his students then argued that it may have been unjust, because he had not been proven guilty, but it was not unfair because the others were treated in the same way. The Times, Sidney Morgenbesser: Erudite and influential American linguistic philosopher with the analytical acuity of Spinoza and the blunt wit of Groucho Marx https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sidney-morgenbesser-5cz8gg8qfvm, September 8, 2004. This alternative version is sometimes attributed to Morgenbesser himself.

Eliezer Yudkowsky photo

“If people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979) American blogger, writer, and artificial intelligence researcher

How to Seem (and Be) Deep http://lesswrong.com/lw/k8/how_to_seem_and_be_deep/ (October 2007)

Colum McCann photo

“The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Dwight D. Eisenhower photo

“You do not lead by hitting people over the head -- that's assault, not leadership.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

Related topics