
“Too much gravity argues a shallow mind.”
No. 183
Aphorisms on Man (1788)
Source: A Relation of the Conference betweene William Lawd...and Mr. Fisher the Jesuite (1639), quoted in The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Volume II: Conference with Fisher (1849), p. 272
“Too much gravity argues a shallow mind.”
No. 183
Aphorisms on Man (1788)
“I was too near it then to see how shallow it all was...”
Source: I Want to be a Mathematician: An Automathography (1985)
“Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep.”
"What I Am"; the earliest references to this clearly indicate "choke" is the word used in the song; since then "chuck me" and "shove me" have sometimes appeared in internet renditions of the lyrics.
Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars (1988)
Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. III : The Master, p. 70
Context: A war for a great principle ennobles a nation. A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext, is despicable, and more than aught else demonstrates to what immeasurable depths of baseness men and nations can descend. Commercial greed values the lives of men no more than it values the lives of ants. The slave-trade is as acceptable to a people enthralled by that greed, as the trade in ivory or spices, if the profits are as large.
From the late 1640s, in Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (2002), p. 101.
“I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too.”
Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 7.
The Almost Perfect State (1921)
Context: The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it.
Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
BUT... overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason: The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean.