- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony. Please feel free to browse and borrow.
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Popular Quotables
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,502)
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- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,279)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,793)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,230)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,606)
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- “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,909)
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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Quotations about effect
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Native ability without education is like a tree which bears no fruit.
Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435 – c. 356 BC) Cyrenaic philosopher, Hedonist
(Attributed)
Quoted in Edward Parsons Day, Day’s Collacon: An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations (1884). Not found in original source material.
A teacher’s major contribution may pop out anonymously in the life of some ex-student’s grandchild.
Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist
“Wallace Stegner and the Great Community,” What Are People For? (1990)
(Source)
Our acts make or mar us, we are the children of our own deeds.
Victor Hugo (1802-1885) French writer
(Attributed)
Quoted in Henry Southgate, Things a Lady Would Like To Know, 2nd ed. (1875). But not confirmed or found in Hugo's writings.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar.
And what we have been makes us what we are.
George Eliot (1819-1880) English novelist [pseud. of Mary Ann Evans]
Middlemarch (1871-72)
You never can tell when you do an act
Just what the result will be;
But with every deed you are sowing a seed,
Though the harvest you may not see.Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author and poet.
“You Never Can Tell,” Custer And Other Poems (1896)
(Source)
If one takes care of the means, the end will take care of itself.
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) Indian philosopher and nationalist [Mahatma Gandhi]
In Harijan (6 Feb 1939)
And is he dead whose glorious mind
Lifts thine on high?
To live in the hearts we leave
Is not to die!
Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) Scottish poet
“Hallowed Ground” (1825)
Every act alters the soul of the doer.
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), German author
The Decline of the West, “Cities and Peoples” (1918-22) [tr. Atkinson (1962)]
