Word: maxims
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...strong blast of enthusiasm, but all with no result. I even swept the whole range of a young lady's conceits, from crimps to ceramics, and then got only a few monosyllabic replies. Surely Hercules in my shoes would have found a thirteenth labor. Yet if the old maxim properly valued silence, I had found a treasure; and I began to appreciate the sort of experience that prompted Horace to sing of his "golden Phyrra...
...maxim with these well-informed men never to allow their friends to suppose that they are ignorant of anything. The other evening, when we were debating the authorship of "revenons a nos moutons," one of these gentlemen of wide reading smiled at our ignorance, and assured us Voltaire was the originator. When convinced, with difficulty, of his mistake, he says: "O yes, was thinking of something else; have read so much French since I came to college that I really can't remember everything...
...relation of Rembrandt to Durer may be compared to that of Euripides to Sophocles. Euripides does not scruple to put a fine maxim into the mouth of any character whose surroundings suggest it to him, even if it is out of keeping, while Sophocles sacrifices everything to making each character in his plays a whole, refusing to be misled by his own passing thoughts...
...first fact about college poetry which strikes one is that there is a great deal too much of it. The maxim "Write nothing in verse that can be written in prose" is entirely disregarded, or rather inverted. The would-be poet, thinking that passable poetry is to be preferred to good prose, expends his energies in putting his thoughts into verse, with more or less regard for metre, forgetting that really good prose is seldom written, and that poetry of a certain stamp is always forthcoming, be the occasion a golden wedding in the country, a military dinner in town...