“Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.”

— Joseph Addison

No. 476 (5 September 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)

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 "Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be e…" by Joseph Addison?

Joseph Addison 226

politician, writer and playwright 1672–1719

Related quotes

“Some men […] choose to seek greatness, while others are forced to it. It is always better to choose than to be forced.
A man who is forced is never completely his own master. He must dance on the strings of those who forced him.”

Robert Jordan The Great Hunt

Source: The Great Hunt

“But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.”

Virginia Woolf The Common Reader

"How It Strikes a Contemporary"
The Common Reader (1925)

“Myth therefore seems to choose history, rather than be chosen by it.”

François-Bernard Mâche (1935) French composer

Music, Myth and Nature, p. 21

“No war is ever fought exactly like any other before it, and history is full of stories of commanders who came to grief trying to follow an old pattern of victory once too often. Whatever is new in tactics, equipment or method must be taught at the squad level before a soldier gets into combat.”

Mark W. Clark (1896–1984) American general

Source: From the Danube to the Yalu (1954), p. 25

“The Greeks were men of sense; if they used the system they did so for a purpose, as artists rather than mathematicians and imperceptible irregularities could not affect that purpose.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Source: Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922), Ch. II

“The only string theories we really understand well have exact supersymmetry.”

Michael Dine (1953) American physicist

Source: [Loose Ends: String Theory and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, World Science Festival, 2 August 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSWd21z2qqE] (quote at 40:20 of 1:27:24)