“I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests of men about men I greatly dislike.”
Diary (14 March 1881)
1880s
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James A. Garfield129
American politician, 20th President of the United States (i… 1831–1881Related quotes
“In my doctrine, I dislike preconceived, narrow spirit. You must study this well.”
Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist
Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Wind Book
Context: Your strategy is of no account if when called on to fight in a confined space your heart is inclined to the long sword, or if you are in a house armed only with your companion sword. Besides, some men have not the strength of others.
In my doctrine, I dislike preconceived, narrow spirit. You must study this well.
Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) English social reformer and statistician, and the founder of modern nursing
Cassandra (1860)
“Men dislike being awakened from their death in life.”
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
William Cowper Prime in The Old House by the River (1853); first misattributed to Hawthorne in Notable Thoughts about Women: A Literary Mosaic (1882) by Maturin Murray Ballou, p. 239
Misattributed
George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist
From a letter to his father, quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife (1924) by Greville MacDonald
Context: I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.
Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States
1860s, Speeches to Ohio Regiments (1864), Speech to the One Hundred Sixty-fourth Ohio Regiment
John Stuart Mill book Autobiography
'Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree, the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons; especially the heroes of philosophy.'
Autobiography (1873)