“As a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”
Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 22 (p. 170)
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Chinua Achebe 63
Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic 1930–2013Related quotes

Heydrich recited this, one of his father's operas, on his deathbed during one of Himmler's visits on 2 June 1941.
Source: [Lehrer, Steven, Steven Lehrer, 2000, 86, Wannsee House and the Holocaust, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 978-0-7864-0792-7, harv]

“Man must be so weighed as though there were a God within him.”
Impendendus homo est, deus esse ut possit in ipso.
Book IV, line 407.
Astronomica

“310. A Man surprized is half beaten.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Quoted as a 1968 statement of Lennon's in Sunday Tasmanian (29 September 1996), and in The Rough Guide to the Beatles (2003) by Chris Ingham, p. 271, this actually derives from a statement which Lennon perhaps had been quoting:
Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
José Ortega y Gasset, in "Art a Thing of No Consequence" in The Dehumanization of Art (1925)
Misattributed

"Art a Thing of No Consequence"
The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)
Context: Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove.
All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.

Reported as being from an 1817 conversation in The Mind of Napoleon, ed. and trans. J. Christopher Herold (1955), p. 249. Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
Attributed
Song, "I've Danced With a Man Who's Danced With a Girl" (1927)