“It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place”
Chicago, IL http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly (17 June 1912)
1910s
An Essay on the Origin of Free-Masonry (1803-1805); found in manuscript form after Paine's death and thought to have been written for an intended part III of The Age of Reason. It was partially published in 1810 and published in its entirety in 1818.
1800s
“the world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.”
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 42, “Beneath the Uduntree” (p. 718).
Context: “Never make your home in a place,” the old man had said, too lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things.” Morgenes had grinned. “That way it will go with you wherever you journey. You’ll never lack for a home—unless you lose your head, of course...”
“All battles are fought by scared men who'd rather be some place else.”
Source: The Haunted Bookshop
Source: Alice Through the Looking Glass
The last sentence is from the 16 October 1854 Peoria speech, slightly paraphrased. No known contemporary source for the rest. It first appears, attributed to Lincoln, in US religious/inspirational journals in 1907-8, such as p123, Friends Intelligencer: a religious and family journal, Volume 65, Issue 8 (1908)
Misattributed
“The great events of the world take place in the brain…”
“Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.”
“Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it right.”
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
“Someday you will name me,
then gently place those burning
holy roses in my hair.
[Songs of Longing]”
Source: Rainer Maria Rilke - Sämtliche Werke (Complete Works)
Source: The Law (1850)
Context: Life, faculties, production — in other words, individuality, liberty, property — this is man. And in spite of the cunning of artful political leaders, these three gifts from God precede all human legislation, and are superior to it. Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.
First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Source: Duino Elegies (1922)
Context: Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)
Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Context: I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it. (p. 17)
Source: Sputnik Sweetheart
Clary and Jace, pg. 98
Source: The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones (2007)
“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”
Letter One (17 February 1903) as translated by M. D. Herter Norton (1993)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)
"Fear, the Foundation of Religion"
1920s, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927)
Source: Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
Context: Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing – fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by the help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hears can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a fit place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
What is Poverty? http://www.city-journal.org/html/9_2_oh_to_be.html (Spring 1999).
City Journal (1998 - 2008)
“Emotions arise in the place where your mind and body meet”
Source: The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Part 2.7 Chapter V. Ways and means of improving the condition of Europe, interspersed with miscellaneous observations
Source: 1790s, Rights of Man, Part 2 (1792)
Context: I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. To me, who have not only refused offers, because I thought them improper, but have declined rewards I might with reputation have accepted, it is no wonder that meanness and imposition appear disgustful. Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Variant: All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
Source: Stillness Speaks
Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Conservation Esthetic", p. 176.
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There
Context: The trophy-recreationist has peculiarities that contribute in subtle ways to his own undoing. To enjoy he must possess, invade, appropriate. Hence the wilderness that he cannot personally see has no value to him. Hence the universal assumption that an unused hinterland is rendering no service to society. To those devoid of imagination a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.
“There is no place to which we could flee from God, which is outside of God.”
Source: Inheritance
“All through life, be sure and put your feet in the right place, and then stand firm.”
As recalled by Rebecca R. Pomroy in Echoes from hospital and White House (1884), by Anna L. Boyden, p. 61 http://books.google.com/books?id=7LZiAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA61&dq=feet
Posthumous attributions
Variant: Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.
“What do we know but that we face one another in this place?”
Interviewed by J. T. LeRoy, "Strange Innocence," Vanity Fair, July 2001
He wrote many of his novels in Hindi on his avowed words, in page=90.
Portrayal of Women in Premchands Stories A Critique
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), IV Perspective of Disappearance
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting
“What was observed by us in the third place is the nature or matter of the Milky Way itself, which, with the aid of the spyglass, may be observed so well that all the disputes that for so many generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible certainty, and we are liberated from wordy arguments.”
Quòd tertio loco à nobis fuit obſeruatum, eſt ipſiuſmet LACTEI Circuli eſſentia, ſeu materies, quam Perſpicilli beneficio adeò ad ſenſum licet intueri, vt & altercationes omnes, quæ per tot ſæcula Philoſophos excrucia runt ab oculata certitudine dirimantur, nosque à verboſis dſputationibus liberemur.
Original text as reproduced in Edward Tufte, Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC, 2006), 101 (p. 3 of 4, insert between pp. 16V & 17R. Original manuscript renders the "q" in "nosque" with acute accent.)
Translation by Albert Van Helden in Sidereus Nuncius (Chicago, 1989), 62
Sidereus Nuncius (Venice, 1609)
St. Francis Xavier: The man and his mission. 1985.
2014, Remarks to the People of Estonia (September 2014)
2016, Remarks to the People of Cuba (March 2016)
Source: A General View of Positivism (1848, 1856), p. 24
No. 15 (March 17, 1711).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
Source: [2002-06-13, http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-920254-details/A+brighter+life+for+Hugh+Laurie/article.do;jsessionid=KnM3FNTSkpv0R3P22WrQBPZQ00jxPTkDtG2htfqq0LvwTtnLx4by!-81402767, A brighter life for Hugh Laurie, thisislondon.co.uk from the Evening Standard, 2006-08-21]
As quoted by Terry Dorian, Total Health and Restoration: A 180-Day Journey (2002), p. 49. Other versions include:
[The] Constitution of this republic should make special provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom ... To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privilege to another will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic. [in Robert L. Schwartz, "Laetrile: The Battle Moves into the Courtroom," American Bar Association Journal, February 1979, p. 226, no citation given]
Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers.
Laws restricting the practice of the healing art to one class of physicians and denying equal privileges to others, constitutes the Bastilles of Medicine, for they prevent progress. They are relics of Monarchy, and therefore have no place in a Republic. [in Thomas Morgan, "National Board of Health. The Other Side of the Question, As It Appears to Thomas Morgan," Youngstown Vindicator, 27 January 1911, p. 6]
This quote is often cited with regards to Rush, and can rarely be found attributed to his autobiography, but does not exist in that book http://books.google.com/books?id=EkTM9Kn9F4IC&q=%22into+the+constitution%22#v=onepage&q=%22into%20the%20constitution%22&f=false http://hpy.sagepub.com/content/16/1/89.abstract. The quote contains words and phrasing that seem anachronistic to late 18th century America.
Misattributed
1990s, Declaration of War against the Americans (1996)
Originates in a 2007 blog post by Iain S. Thomas entitled The Fur http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/2007/08/fur.html
Misattributed
Unexpectedly, this turned out to be true.
1960s, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell (1967-1969)
“Those who trusted at the wrong time and place will in turn mistrust at the wrong time and place.”
Der am unrechten Orte vertraute, wird dafür am unrechten Orte mißtrauen.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 29.
Source: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011), Chapter 3, Page 79
Bible Teaching and Religious Practice http://books.google.com/books?id=sujuHO_fvJgC&pg=PA568&dq=twain+%22Bible+Teaching+and+Religious+Practice%22&cd=1#v=onepage&q=twain%20%22Bible%20Teaching%20and%20Religious%20Practice%22&f=false.
"Bible Teaching and Religious Practice" (1923)
Interview with Alex Haley
2015, Remarks to the Kenyan People (July 2015)
On the role of the press in a democracy
2017, Final News Conference as President (January 2017)
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters
Source: On the Mystical Body of Christ, p.421
1840s, Past and Present (1843)
As quoted in " A Film of One's Own http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/magazine/03actesses.html" by Lynn Hirschberg at The New York Times (September 3, 2006)
1874 https://attackingthedevil.co.uk/related/thoughts.php
1914 - 1916, Pittura e scultura futuriste' Milan, 1914
Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (1780). Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, translation available at Philosophy.eserver.org http://philosophy.eserver.org/kant/metaphys-elements-of-ethics.txt. From section "Preliminary Notions of the Susceptibility of the Mind for Notions of Duty Generally", Part C ("Of love to men")
(1794) [Source: Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions républicaines]
Letter to his wife, reprinted in Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne (1952, trans. 1985). (October 21, 1907)
Rilke's Letters
“We all conceal
A god within us, we all deal
With heaven direct, from whose high places we derive
The inspiration by which we live.”
Est deus in nobis, et sunt commercia caeli:
Sedibus aetheriis spiritus ille venit.
Book III, lines 549–550 (tr. James Michie)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)
Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Volume III, Calcutta, 1928. https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.62677/2015.62677.The-History-Of-Aurangzib-Voliii-Second-Edition_djvu.txt
“One who is blind throws away even a garland of flower placed on his head, thinking it is a snake.”
Abhijñānaśākuntalam (The Sign of Shakuntala)
