“It may be also confessed that life often survives all the perversities of training. We cannot absolutely nullify the prodigality of nature, try as hard as we may.”
To My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs (1895)
Context: It is true— it has been already admitted— that the picture will not be universally recognized; but it has been suggested that the failure of recognition lies rather in the degeneracy of the faculty of seeing than in the misrepresentation of the vision to be seen. It may be also confessed that life often survives all the perversities of training. We cannot absolutely nullify the prodigality of nature, try as hard as we may. In spite of most careful management, untractable growths survive in the most provoking way, and intrude themselves into fields believed to be kept free from their presence. And sometimes it happens that the poor party managers have to accommodate themselves to the genius they curse.
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Leonard H. Courtney 9
British politician 1832–1918Related quotes
Source: The Flame is Green (1971), Ch. 9 : Oh, The Steep Roofs of Paris
Context: Listen now to a series of sayings that always come hard to brave people. Our own great movement will grow with its own impetus wherever it is not blighted. We will break up persons of blight and centers of blight. But often, and this will be the hard part for all of you to understand, we will warn and advise before we kill. And quite often we will not kill at all. Try to understand this.
On ne saurait empêcher l'équilibre de produire ses effets. On peut braver les lois humaines, mais non résister aux lois naturelles.
Part II, ch. XV: Accident or Incident?
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
“We do not live to think, but, on the contrary, we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.”
Source: The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Ch. IV, p. 61
On the concept of home for Latinas in “The Power of a Query: An Interview with Ana Castillo” http://www.acentosreview.com/September_2008/Webhe-Herrera.html in Acentos Review (September 2008)
in his Nobel Autobiography, edited by [Gösta Ekspong, Nobel Lectures in Physics 1991-1995, World Scientific, 1997, 9810226780, 161]