“Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.”

Source: Three Comrades

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Do you have more details about the quote "Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside." by Erich Maria Remarque?
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Erich Maria Remarque 63
German novelist 1898–1970

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“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Quoted in The Algonquin Wits (1968) edited by Robert E. Drennan, and The Dispatch http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=r04cAAAAIBAJ&sjid=WFEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=7250,5269688&dq=aside-lightly+dorothy-parker&hl=en (October 1962). As noted at Snopes, Drennan's source seems to be a Parker review which does not seem to contain this quote. If Parker wrote this statement anywhere the primary source seems to have gone missing.
The earliest attribution of this quote was published in the February 1960 Readers' Digest, and credited to a book review by Sid Ziff in the Los Angeles Mirror-News, which existed from 1955 to 1960. This is a little odd, considering that Sid Ziff was a sports columnist; the reference in Readers' Digest has been confirmed but the quote from the Mirror-News has not - see Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/26/great-force/#more-5787 for details.
Misattributed

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“The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

Variant text: The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life.
The Art of Fiction http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/artfiction.html (1884)

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“Life resembles a novel more often than novels resemble life.”

La vie ressemble plus souvent à un roman qu'un roman ne ressemble à la vie.
Metella, ch. 1 (1833); Robert J. Ackerman Perfect Daughters (Deerfield Beach, Fla.: HCI, 2002) p. 31

“Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.”

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter VII : "It's Just Like Living", p. 186

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“No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 32, January 13, 1944.

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“Mercury has cast aside
The signs of intellectual pride,
Freely offers thee the soul:
Art thou noble to receive?”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Life Without and Life Within (1859), My Seal-Ring
Context: Mercury has cast aside
The signs of intellectual pride,
Freely offers thee the soul:
Art thou noble to receive?
Canst thou give or take the whole,
Nobly promise and believe?
Then thou wholly human art,
A spotless, radiant, ruby heart,
And the golden chain of love
Has bound thee to the realm above.

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