“Emily pounded on the door, assuming it would do no good, but finding the act of pounding very satisfying indeed.”
Source: The Hidden Goddess (2011), Chapter 21, “The Dragon’s Eye” (p. 330)
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M. K. Hobson 47
American writer 1969Related quotes
“Leaving America is like losing twenty pounds and finding a new girlfriend.”
Source: The Broadside Tapes 1 (made in the 1960s; published c. 1980), Liner notes
“Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let's see who will pound longest.”
At the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815), as quoted by Sir Walter Scott, in Paul's Letters to His Kinsfolk (1815).
Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain
Disputed
“Whether I pound or am being pounded,
all the same there will be moaning!”
Peer Gynt, declaring that no matter what he does, it is not what people want, Act I, Scene I
Peer Gynt (1867)
“A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.”
An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.
Source: The Theory of Political Economy (1871), Chapter VII, Theory of Capital, p. 190.
Section 3, “Lifestyle, Spin, and Soft News” Chapter 23, “Tsongkerclintkinbro Wins” (p. 106)
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995)
“Auberson’s first impression of the man was of eight pounds of potatoes in a ten-pound sack.”
Section 16 (p. 82)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)
“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”
Source: "The Conduct of Inquiry", p. 28.
Context: In addition to the social pressures from the scientific community there is also at work a very human trait of individual scientist. I call it the law of the instrument, and it may be formulated as follows: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled.