William Benton Quotes

#1. The Chinese, whom it might be well to disparage less and imitate more, seem almost the only people among whom learning and merit have the ascendency, and wealth is not the standard of estimation.

William Benton Clulow

#2. The effusions of genius are entitled to admiration rather than applause, as they are chiefly the effect of natural endowment, and sometimes appear to be almost involuntary.

William Benton Clulow

#3. I'm moved by everything broken and crippled. Since that's how we really are.

Anna Kamienska

#4. Foreknowledge cannot be gotten from ghosts and spirits, cannot be had by analogy, cannot be found out by calculation. It must be obtained from people, people who know the conditions of the enemy.

Sun Tzu

#5. Language is properly the servant of thought, but not unfrequently becomes its master. The conceptions of a feeble writer are greatly modified by his style; a man of vigorous powers makes his style bend to his conceptions.

William Benton Clulow

#6. LORD GORING: (after a long pause) Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.

Oscar Wilde

#7. Philosophy abounds more than philosophers, and learning more than learned men.

William Benton Clulow

#8. I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.

William Benton Clulow

#9. When one has shot down one's first, second or third opponent, then one begins to find out how the trick is done.

Manfred Von Richthofen

#10. Local esteem is far more conducive to happiness than general reputation. The latter may be compared to the fixed stars which glimmer so remotely as to afford little light and no warmth. The former is like the sun, each day shedding his prolific and cheering beams.

William Benton Clulow

#11. Long ago you were a dream in your mother's sleep, and then she awoke to give you birth.

Kahlil Gibran

#12. The same man cannot be both Friend and Flatterer.

Benjamin Franklin

#13. A thorough: miser must possess considerable strength of character to bear the self-denial imposed by his penuriousness. Equal sacrifices, endured voluntarily in a better cause, would make a saint or a martyr.

William Benton Clulow

#14. Man often acquires just so much knowledge as to discover his ignorance, and attains so much experience as to regret his follies, and then dies.

William Benton Clulow

#15. The advantage of the free market system is that people invest their capital, they create jobs by investing their capital, and hopefully they get a return on that investment. I don't think there's anything wrong with good old American capitalism.

Steve Stivers

#16. I see myself as universal, not as a German, American, French or whatever, because we all live on this planet. We're all living on the earth.

Klaus Nomi

#17. After upwards of two thousand years Epicurus has been exonerated from the reproach that the doctrines of his philosophy recommended the pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness as the chief good. Calumny may rest on genius a considerable part of a world's duration; what then is the value of fame?

William Benton Clulow

#18. They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

William Shakespeare

#19. Scandal is the sport of its authors, the dread of fools, and the contempt of the wise.

William Benton Clulow

#20. Time sheds a softness on remote objects or events, as local distance imparts to the landscape a smoothness and mellowness which disappear on a nearer approach.

William Benton Clulow

#21. There is such a delusion as evinces itself in cool vehemence; and it is the most dangerous of all expressions of fanaticism.

William Benton Clulow

#22. The ancient practice of allowing land to remain fallow for a season is now exploded, and a succession of different crops found preferable. The case is similar with regard to the understanding, which is more relieved by change of study than by total inactivity.

William Benton Clulow

#23. The fame which bids fair to live the longest resembles that which Horace attributes to Marcellus, whose progress he compares to the silent, imperceptible growth of a tree.

William Benton Clulow

#24. If solitude deprives of the benefit of advice, it also excludes from the mischief of flattery. But the absence of others' applause is generally supplied by the flattery of one's own breast.

William Benton Clulow

#25. Great books, like large skulls, have often the least brains.

William Benton Clulow

#26. I didn't know much about my Native American ancestry, but as I got older I became more interested in it.

Alan Robinson

#27. Sensibility is the power of woman.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

#28. Error is sometimes so nearly allied to truth that it blends with it as imperceptibly as the colors of the rainbow fade into each other.

William Benton Clulow

#29. Topics of conversation among the multitude are generally persons, sometimes things, scarcely ever principles.

William Benton Clulow

#30. For popular purposes, at least, the aim of literary artists should be similar to that of Rubens in his landscapes, of which, without neglecting the minor traits or finishing, he was chiefly solicitous to present the leading effect, or what we may call the inspiration.

William Benton Clulow

#31. It is possible to indulge too great contempt for mere success, which is frequently attended with all the practical advantages of merit itself, and with several advantages that merit alone can never command.

William Benton Clulow

#32. My family always comes first. My world revolves around my husband, Peter, our daughter, Victoria, and our son, William, but not necessarily in that order. Then, it's this fascinating world of publishing that devours most of my days and many nights.

Dorothea Benton Frank