Doe Quotes - Page 244

How does it happen, Maecenas, that no one is content with that lot in life which he has chosen, or which chance has thrown in his way, but praises those who follow a different course? [Lat., Qui fit, Maecenas, ut nemo quam sibi sortem, Seu ratio dederit, seu fors objecerit, illa Contentus vivat? laudet diversa sequentes.]

Too great a display of delicacy can and does sometimes infringe upon de-cency.

Power does not consist in striking with force or with frequency, but in striking true.

Your modest savant smiles as he says to his admirers: What have I done? Nothing. Man does not invent a force, he directs it.

The man who is rich in fancy thinks that his wagon is already built; poor fool, he does not know that there are a hundred timbers to a wagon.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

As the old saw says well: every end does not appear together with its beginning.

Music may appeal to crude and coarse feelings or to refined and noble ones; and in so far as it does the latter it awakens the higher nature and works an effect, though but a transitory effect, of a beneficial kind. But the primary purpose of music is neither instruction nor culture but pleasure; and this is an all-sufficient purpose.

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Nobody really thinks who does not abstract from that which is given, who does not relate the facts to the factors which have made them, who does not - in his mind - undo the facts. Abstractness is the very life of thought, the token of its authenticity.

Free speech does not live many hours after free industry and free commerce die.

He who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored

God plants no yearning in the human soul that he does not intend to satisfy.

A man who does not love praise is not a full man.

There is not a person we employ who does not, like ourselves, desire recognition, praise, gentleness, forbearance, patience.

I know not how it is, but during a voyage I collect books as a ship does barnacles.

Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest.

A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.

The GOP grows more and more unpopular with female voters seemingly every time one of its leaders gets in front of a microphone. Misogynist is as misogynist does. The GOP and its bloviating pundits don't like women and they are unable to hide it, nor do they seem to make much attempt to do so.

We [Federal Government] have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.

Life is work, and everything you do is so much more experience. Sometimes you work for wages, sometimes not, but what does anybody make but a living? And whatever you have you must either use or lose.

Wars do not end wars any more than an extraordinarily large conflagration does away with the fire hazard.

Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance.

There may be something petty in a refined taste; it easily degenerates into effeminacy. It does not consider the broadest use. It is not content with simple good and bad, and so is fastidious and curious or nice only.

Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides States and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.