Digressions Quotes
|
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; & they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along with them.
|
More Digressions Quotes
Even good arguments fail, if they are spiced with Digressions .
— Fausto Cercignani in: Brian Morris, Simply Transcribed. Quotations from Fausto Cercignani, 2014, p. 23.
Even good arguments fail, if they are spiced with Digressions.
— Fausto Cercignani as quoted in Simply Transcribed : Quotations from Fausto Cercignani (2014) by Brian Morris, p. 23
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;theyare the life, the soul of reading;take them out of this book for instance,you might as well take the book along with them.
Laurence Sterne— 1759-67 Tristram Shandy, bk.1, ch.22.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —& they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them.
Laurence Sterne— Book I, Ch. 22.
A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there was an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man a man of restless and versatile intellect who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent Digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
— Thomas Henry Huxley, reported in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S, (1900), Leonard Huxley ed.
— Many variants exist, see: Thomas Henry Huxley
A man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there was an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man a man of restless and versatile intellect who not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them with aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent Digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
thomas henry huxley— One account of his famous response to Samuel Wilberforce, who during a debate had sarcastically questioned: "whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's" (30 June 1860), as quoted in Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley F.R.S (1900) edited by Leonard Huxley. There were no precise transcripts of this exchange made at the time, but only various accounts which were made afterwards, in the journals and memoirs of others. Other accounts assert that after Wilberforce's query he declared to Sir Benjamin Brodie "The Lord hath delivered him into my hands" rose from his seat, gave a thorough defense of Darwin's theories, and at the end concluded: "I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth."If the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.Response, as quoted in Harvest of a Quiet Eye (1977) by Alan L. Mackay.
