Pt. I, sc. vi, Napoleon
The Dynasts (1904–1908)
Source: Psychology of management, 1914, p. 1
“Milton had a highly imaginative, Cowley a very fanciful mind.”
Source: Biographia Literaria (1817), Ch. IV
“It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.”
More commonly misattributed to Andrew Jackson, the originator of this line is actually unknown.
Misattributed
“There is a spell of unresisted power
In wonder-working weak simplicity,
Because it is not fear'd.”
Sylphs
Poems (1851), Prometheus
Context: The mighty Jove did love us. Did? He does.
There is a spell of unresisted power
In wonder-working weak simplicity,
Because it is not fear'd.
“Of course, this is a heuristic, which is a fancy way of saying that it doesn't work.”
My Life With Spam : How I Caught the Spam and What I Did With It, February 9, 2000, Dominus, Mark Jason, 2006-11-30 http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2000/02/spamfilter.html,
“And a proverb haunts my mind
As a spell is cast,
"The mill cannot grind
With the water that is past."”
Poem: Lesson of the Water-Mill.
Source: The Tale of Despereaux (2004)
Context: Despereaux looked down at the book, and something remarkable happened. The marks on the pages, the "squiggles" as Merlot referred to them, arranged themselves into shapes. The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time
“It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.”
Sometimes reported as having been a retort to statements of his political rival, John Quincy Adams, who had boycotted Harvard University's awarding of a Doctorate of Laws degree to Jackson in 1833, declaring "I would not be present to witness her [Harvard's] disgrace in conferring her highest literary honors on a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and could hardly spell his own name." Quoted in News Reporting and Writing 4th edition (1987) by M. Mencher.
Unsourced variant: Never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.
Likely misattributed http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/25/spelling/
“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.”
Presidential Address to the First Indian Statistical Congress, 1938. Sankhya 4, 14-17.
1930s
