A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night.
“I suppose one oughtnt to marry anybody, unless ones prepared to make him a full-time job.Probably not; though there are a few rare people, I believe, who dont look on themselves as jobs but as fell...”
“If it ever occurs to people to value the honour of the mind equally with the honour of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort.”
“The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statement...”
“It's disquieting to reflect that one's dreams never symbolize one's real wishes, but always something Much Worse... If I really wanted to be passionately embraced by Peter, I should dream of dentis...”
“You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour...”
“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him -- or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great father...”
“There is a great tendency today to want everybody to write just the way everybody else does, to see and to show the same things in the same way to the same middling audience. But the writer, in ord...”
“Unlike written words which can mend those leaving the tip of your tongue never bend.”
“More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”
“For an apple you cant reach up and pick, you have to climb that tree; the tree wont bend down for you!”
“For an apple you can’t reach up and pick, you have to climb that tree; the tree won’t bend down for you!”
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.”
“If only [people] understood that every thought is both false and true! False by one-sidenedness resulting from man's inability to embrace the whole truth, and true as an expression of one fact of h...”
“Ihr redet, wenn ihr aufhrt mit euren Gedanken in Frieden zu sein.”