“It is only Christians that guard even pagan things” – G. K. Chesterton
“I believe in Christianity as I believe in the risen sun; not because I see it, but by it I can see all else” – C. S. Lewis
“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” – G. K. Chesterton
While working on my upcoming rhetoric text I was reading Acts 26:24, where Paul’s defense is interrupted by Festus, saying, “You are out of your mind, Paul! Your great learning is driving you insane.” Festus’s assumption that great thinkers often go mad reminded me of Aristotle’s discussion of the degrading of human character in Rhetoric II.15, where he says, “A clever stock will degenerate towards the insane type of character.” Written about 400 years before the events of Acts 26, had Aristotle’s claim had become a familiar probability?
“Knowledge is not what you can remember, but what you cannot forget.” – Kin Hubbard
“Education is what you have left after you’ve forgotten everything that you learned.” – Anon
“How we learn is what we learn.” – Bonnie Friedman
One late fall in the forest, a squirrel was running back and forth on the tree branches, storing up his nuts in the hollow of an old oak near his home. He was careful to keep his storage place secret so that the nuts would not be stolen, and to make the place deep and high in the strong tree. As he was busy storing the product of his labors, he ran across a rabbit returning from one of his visits to a nearby farmer’s garden. The rabbit had lots of carrots that he kept in some tall grass outside his rabbit hole. The squirrel saw this and called down to the rabbit, “Friend, shouldn’t you put that produce in a safe place? Anyone or anything could take them from you, and all your labor will be in vain!” The rabbit replied, “Thank you for your advice, but I have been keeping my carrots in this grass for a long time, and nothing has ever happened to them.” But the very next day, when the rabbit was once again gone to the garden, a rat came scuttling by, saw all the delicious carrots, and carried off as many as he could to his home in the farmer’s shed. When the rabbit returned and saw the carrots gone from the grassy place, he ran all over in a panic trying to find where they all went, but to no avail. The squirrel came to him and said, “Friend, if you had listened to me and taken a little extra effort to keep the product of your work in a safe place, you would not be enduring this sad loss.” So you also should back up your computer files, for you never know what might happen to make you lose all your work.
“The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” – E. J. Phelps
“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to try to please everybody.” – Bill Cosby
“Avoid using mixed metaphors. They kindle a flood of confusion in your readers.” – Richard Lederer
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Appearing effortless takes all the effort in the world.” – Chris Schlect
“By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail.” – Ben Franklin
“Any kid will run an errand for you, if you ask at bedtime” – Red Skelton
“A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject, and short enough to create interest” – Winston Churchill
“There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you’re busy interrupting.” – Mark Twain
“Truth carries with it confrontation. Truth demands confrontation; loving confrontation, but confrontation nevertheless.” – Francis Schaeffer
“Liars are experts in chopping logic and missing the truth slightly – ‘Did God say not to eat from any tree?’ In order to pin a liar down, words must be defined in the most careful manner available.” – Douglas Wilson
“You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” – G. K. Chesterton
“It is terrible to speak well and be wrong.” – Sophocles
“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech” – Martin Farquhar Tupper
“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.” – Dionysus of Halicarnassus
In anticipation of my soon-to-be-published rhetoric text, Fitting Words, I have decided to post each Monday my favorite commonplaces, scrounged and solicited over the past twenty years of teaching rhetoric. Each post will include two or three quotes on a given topic.
It is fitting that the topic of this first post be commonplaces about commonplaces.
“I always have a quotation for everything – it saves original thinking.” – Dorothy Sayers
“If you can’t write your message in a sentence, you can’t say it in an hour.” – Dianna Booker
“Un bon mot ne prouve rien.” [“A witty saying proves nothing”] – Voltaire