Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)
“Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single effort that the human undertakes, and he must do it as a child. An adult is rarely successful in the undertaking — the reduction of experience to a set of symbols. For a thousand thousand years these humans have existed and they have only learned this trick — this magic — in the final ten thousand of the thousand thousand.”
Introduction
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (1976)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Some people there are who, being grown, forget the horrible task of learning to read. It is perhaps the greatest single…" by John Steinbeck?
John Steinbeck 366
American writer 1902–1968Related quotes
“It is better to live ten years at a thousand [miles per hour] than a thousand years at a ten”
Lobão
(1957) Brazilian musician
From the lyrics of his song Vida Louca, Vida (Life, Crazy Life)
“A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.”
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 177
“You'll never learn to act in Hollywood. Not in a thousand years.”
Margaret Sullavan
(1909–1960) actress
Lawrence J. Quirk, Child of Fate - Margaret Sullavan, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1986, ISBN 0312514425, p. 77.
“Ten thousand do not turn the scale against a single man of worth.”
Heraclitus
(-535) pre-Socratic Greek philosopher
in Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon (New York: 1982), p. 107
“He must for seasons thrice ten thousand roam”
Empedocles
(-490–-430 BC) ancient Greek philosopher
tr. Phillip H. De Lacy and Benedict Einarson. Cf. full quotation at Leonard p. 54-55 https://books.google.com/books?id=omUTAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA54#v=onepage&q&f=false
fr. 115, as paraphrased in Plutarch's Moralia
Purifications
Context: A law there is, an oracle of Doom, Of old enacted by the assembled gods, That if a Daemon—such as live for ages— Defile himself with foul and sinful murder, He must for seasons thrice ten thousand roam Far from the Blest; such is the path I tread, I too a wanderer and exile from heaven.
Ramzan Kadyrov
(1976) President of Chechnya, former militia leader
Source: "Coronavirus: Chechen leader Kadyrov 'healthy' after Covid scare" in BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52832611 (28 May 2020)
Frederick II of Prussia
(1712–1786) king of Prussia
Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (New York: Brentano's, 1927), trans. Richard Aldington, letter 48 from Frederick to Voltaire (1740-01-06)