Tracing Quotations
Thomas Hardy? John Ruskin? William Stearns Davis? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Comedy and tragedy are sometimes intertwined. The prominent English novelist Thomas Hardy has received credit for the following remark: Comedy is tragedy, if you only look deep enough. This statement has also been ascribed to the influential English art critic John Ruskin. Would you …
Continue reading “All Comedy Is Tragedy, If You Only Look Deep Enough Into It”
Joan Baez? Phillip L. Berman? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: An artist who is crafting a powerful song, poem, or story may feel a lack of control. The mind and body are simply operating as a channel for the emergence of the work. A songwriter once made this point by saying something like: The lyrics moved …
Continue reading “The Words Have Just Crawled Down My Sleeve and Come Out On the Page”
Jonathan Swift? Benjamin Franklin? Shirley Chisholm? Thomas Moffett? John Ward? King James I of England? Thomas Fuller? John Gay? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: During a commencement address I heard the following vivid advice offered to students: Be as bold as the first man or woman to eat an oyster. Apparently, the famous Irish literary figure …
Continue reading “Whoever First Ate an Oyster Was a Brave Soul”
Benjamin Graham? Warren Buffett? Ronald A. McEachern? Ben Bidwell? John C. Bogle? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: A brilliant metaphorical framework for understanding the stock market can be summarized with the following cogent remark: In the short-run, the stock market is a voting machine. Yet, in the long-run, it is a weighing machine. Each purchase and …
Fannie Hurst? Charlotte Whitton? Joan Lowell? Jack Lewis? Lewis Browne? Myrtelle L. Gunsul? Lilias F. Evans? Anna Judge Vetters Levy? Anonymous? Question for Quote Investigator: Fannie Hurst was a popular novelist who was born in 1885. She believed that women faced greater obstacles to professional success than men. Apparently, she employed the following expression: A …
Continue reading “A Woman Has To Be Twice as Good as a Man To Go Half as Far”
F. Scott Fitzgerald? Lionel Trilling? Katherine A. Powers? H. Maynard Smith? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Our experiences in the world are often complex, ambiguous, and ill-defined. We must be able to accommodate conflicting hypotheses. Here is a pertinent adage: The truest sign of intelligence is the ability to entertain two contradictory ideas simultaneously. A notion …
Jean-Luc Godard? Aristotle? Peter Dickinson? George W. Feinstein? Eugenia Thornton? Chris Haws? David Mamet? Dear Quote Investigator: An iconoclastic French film director once commented on the narrative structure of a story. The auteur believed that it was not necessary for a tale to be recounted using the conventional ordering for the beginning, the middle, and …
Don Marquis? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: One strategy for attacking an idea is to exhibit a repugnant individual who supports the idea. This method can influence the opinions of those who are susceptible to psychological manipulation, but it is logically flawed. Here is a pertinent adage: An idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe …
Continue reading “An Idea Isn’t Responsible for the People Who Believe In It”
Don Marquis? Anonymous? Dear Quote Investigator: Recently, a wealthy acquaintance told me that hard work was their key to becoming rich. I asked, “Whose?” Would you please explore the provenance of this riposte? Quote Investigator: Don Marquis was a popular columnist and storyteller. In 1921 he published a column called “The Weather Vane” that was …
Continue reading “When Croesus Tells You He Got Rich Through Hard Work, Ask Him “Whose?””