
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the World. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
https://twitter.com/wise_chimp/status/1488946174321205253?s=21
Memoirs of J. Casanova de Seingalt (1894)
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the World. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
https://twitter.com/wise_chimp/status/1488946174321205253?s=21
Response to a would be biographer in 1980, as quoted in "When Stephen met Sylvia" in The Guardian (24 April 2004) http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1201328,00.html
Context: I am very honoured by your wanting to write a life of me. But the fact is I regard my life as rather a failure in the only thing in which I wanted it to succeed. I have not written the books I ought to have written and I have written a lot of books I should not have written. My life as lived by me has been interesting to me but to write truthfully about it would probably cause much pain to people close to me — and I always feel that the feelings of the living are more important than the monuments of the dead.
Fiction, "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", Orbit 10 (1972)
“I am writing My Life to laugh at myself, and I am succeeding.”
As quoted in [Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: From Alexander II to the abdication of Nicholas II, https://books.google.com/books?id=wGp4M2DzfMQC&pg=PA341, 1995, Princeton University Press, 0-691-02947-4, 341–]
Speech to the Reichstag (14 June 1882), quoted in W. H. Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism: An Exposition of the Social and Economic Legislation of Germany since 1870 (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891), p. 32
1880s