Variant Quotes
More Variant Quotes
Édouard Fournier, in L'Espirit dans l'Historie (1867), 3rd edition, Ch. 51, p. 260, disputes the traditional attribution, and suggests various agents of Richelieu might have been the actual author. Variant translations: Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him.
cardinal richelieu— Attributed in Dictionary of Foreign Phrases and Classical Quotations (1908) edited by Hugh Percy Jones, p. 327
Variant translation: Pray to the I don't-know-who: Jesus Christ, I hope.
eugène ionesco— As quoted in Parasuicidality and Paradox : Breaking Through the Medical Model (2007) by Ross D. Ellenhorn, p. 55
For somehow this is tyranny's disease, to trust no friends. Variant translation: In every tyrant's heart there springs in the end this poison, that he cannot trust a friend.
Aeschylus— line 224
Variant translations: Men willingly believe what they wish to be true.
julius caesar— As quoted in The Adventurer No. 69 (3 July 1753) in The Works of Samuel Johnson (1837) edited by Arthur Murphy, p. 32
Variant : They did unto others what they would not have others do unto them, an immoral principle that is the basic premise of the art of war.
jules verne— Tr. Walter James Miller (1978)
Variant : If we are to believe certain narrow minded people — and what else can we call them? — humanity is confined within a circle of Popilius from which there is no escape, condemned to vegetate upon this globe, never able to venture into interplanetary space! That's not so! We are going to the moon, we shall go to the planets, we shall travel to the stars just as today we go from Liverpool to New York, easily, rapidly, surely, and the oceans of space will be crossed like the seas of the moon.
jules verne— Tr. Walter James Miller (1978)
Variant : The planet doesn't need new continents, it needs new men.
jules verne— Tr. Walter James Miller (1966)
Variant translations: The original style is not the style which never borrows of any one, but that which no other person is capable of reproducing.
françois-rené de chateaubriand— As translated by Charles I. White (1856) Part 2, Book 1, Chapter 3
Variant: Et des boyaux du dernier prêtre Serrons le cou du dernier roi.
Denis Diderot— Let us strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.Attributed to Diderot by Jean-François de La Harpe in Cours de Littérature Ancienne et Moderne (1840)
Variant: It is by acts and not by ideas that people live.
anatole france— As quoted in The Ironic Temper : Anatole France and His Time (1932)
Variant translation: In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.
Galileo Galilei— As quoted in Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men (1859) by François Arago, as translated by Baden Powell, Robert Grant, and William Fairbairn, p. 365
Variant: A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.
paul valéry— Widely misquoted, this is a paraphrase of Valéry by W. H. Auden in 1965. See W. H. Auden: Collected Poems (2007), ed. Edward Mendelson, "Author's Forewords", p. xxx
It is perhaps well enough that the people of the Nation do not know or understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. Variant: If the American people knew the corruption in our money system there would be revolution before morning.
— Attributed to Henry Ford by Charles Binderup (March 19, 1937), Congressional Record—House 81:2528. The quote is preceded by "It was Henry Ford who said, in substance, this", which indicates that this is likely just a paraphrase, not an exact quote.
Variant: Hatred without compassion cannot win minds, to conquer is not to convince.
— As quoted in Spanish Recognitions : The Roads to the Present (2004) by Mary Lee Settle, p. 134
Variant translations:
— The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett? (2007), by Lee Oser, p. 29
Variant: We are born amid feces and urine.
— Attributed to Augustine in "Select Proverbs of All Nations" (1824) by "Thomas Fielding" (John Wade), p. 216, and later in the form "The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page", as quoted in 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1995) by Evan Esar, p. 822; this has not been located in Augustine's writings, and may be a variant translation of an expression found in Le Cosmopolite (1753) by Fougeret de Monbron: "The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one's own country."
Variant translations: The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his actions. The greater man does not boast of himself, But does what he must do. A good man does not give orders, but leads by example.
— Virtue (or the man of virtue) is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.
Variant translations:
— The most profound respect is due to children.
— The greatest reverence is due to a child.
Variant translation: So much wrong could religion induce.
— Book I, line 155-6
Variant translation: Nothing can be created out of nothing.
— Book I, line 268.
Variant translation: Maybe one day we shall be glad to remember even these things.
— Through various hazards and events we move.
— Line 204 (translated by John Dryden).
Cf. Ovid , Fasti , IV, 311: The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughed to scorn the falsehood of report. Variant translations of mens sibi conscia recti (meaning "a good conscience"):
— A mind conscious of its own rectitude.
— A mind conscious to itself of rectitude.
— A mind which is conscious to itself of rectitude.
Variant translations:
— Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction.
— Being not unacquainted with woe, I learn to help the unfortunate.
— No stranger to trouble myself I am learning to care for the unhappy.
Variant translations:
— Involving truth in obscurity.
— Wrapping truth in obscurity.
— Shrouding truth in darkness.
— Involving the truth in obscure terms.
Variant translation: Far off, Oh keep far off, you uninitiated ones. Now, Aeneas, thou needest thy courage, now thy stout heart!
— Now, Aeneas, thou needest thy courage, now thy stout heart!
— Line 261; Sibyl's words to Aeneas as they enter the underworld.
— Variant: "Now, Aeneas, is the hour for courage, now for a dauntless heart!"
Variant translations of Malesuada Fames :
— Hunger persuading to evil.
— Hunger is a bad adviser.
Variant translation: All life is bound together by mutual support and interdependence. V
— Swami Vivekananda, in Paper On Hinduism Read at the Parliament on 19th September, 1893
Of a number of Variant hypotheses about the same facts, that one is true which shows why facts, which in the other hypotheses remain unrelated, are as they are, i.e., which demonstrates their orderly and rational mathematical connexion.
johannes kepler— Vol. I, p. 238
Paraphrased Variant: Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.
gilbert keith chesterton— Appeared in Criminal Minds 2007 episode Seven Seconds (IMDB quote entry)
