Conference thebay::joyoflex

    Use the Joe Biden approach.  Take credit yourself.
    
    Actually, it seems to me that cliches don't need to be attributed
    to anyone.
    
    Clay

     The Concise Oxford Dict. of Quotations gives it to Rabelais, quoting
    an article of ancient wisdom, and further recommends that you compare
    it with whatever Plutarch said in his Moralia in the section "De
    Placitas Philosophorum,"I.xviii, but if you really want to do that
    I'm afraid you'll have to do it on your own, as I seem to have
    misplaced my copy of the Moralia. Such clutter around here...
    
    -John

   It's too bad that you don't have your copy of the Moralia.  This has
   been an enlightening discussion so far.
   
   BTW, I turned my paper in this morning, using that quote as the title.
   I didn't give anybody credit.  I'm hoping the professor won't know
   who said it, either... :^(.
   
   
   							Terza
   

    Bartlett's attributes it to Benedict Spinoza's "Ethics".

    A famous old sociologist, whose name escapes me at the moment, wrote
    a book called "On the Shoulders of Giants", in which he attempted
    to trace back Tristan Terza's famous saying, "If I have seen further 
    than others, it is because I done stood on the shoulders of giants."
    He got it all the way back to way back there.  I have the book,
    but I've never read it.  

    Robert Nesbit

    When I was a Quotations man, the furthest we could trace it back
    was someone writing in Latin - it may have been Aquinas: `... nam
    natura abhorret vacuo'. But I guess the Rabelais attribution was
    right, in that it in turn attributes the saying to ancient wisdom.
    I'm sure the furthest we got wasn't the end of the line.
    
    b

    After seeing the reference in .5 to the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, I 
    took my copy (Second edition) from the shelf and did a little browsing.
    
    .11 says:
    
>   When I was a Quotations man, the furthest we could trace it back
>   was someone writing in Latin - it may have been Aquinas: `... nam
>   natura abhorret vacuo'. But I guess the Rabelais attribution was
>   right, in that it in turn attributes the saying to ancient wisdom.
>   I'm sure the furthest we got wasn't the end of the line.
    
    I came across the following, which either Plutarch or Thomas Aquinas may 
    have refined into something more short and to the point. It certainly
    seems to me to contain the germ of the idea:
    
    Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret. 
    
      "If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back."
    						Horace: Epistles, I, xi. 8

    re .12
    
    Interesting, but if you read Horace's poem, you'll find that
    it refers to "nature" in the psychological sense, meaning that you 
    can't easily change your habits.
    
    "Natura abhorret vacuo" was a physician's saying, and it's much older 
    than Rabelais and Horace. I believe I've seen the idea in Lucretia. 
    "De Natura Rerum", which is an attempt at explaining the  physical
    world, deals a lot with vacuum.
    
    Actually the saying is probably even older. Investigation should
    involve Democrit and the Greek philosophers of the 5th century BC,
    but I doubt it's possible to find a single originator.
    
    roger 

    I'm sure Roger's right on two points:
    
    	a	The Horace quotation is not the root (the only word in
    		common is `natura', and as he says that word means `nature'
    		in a different sense); besides, I can't stretch my
    		imagination in any way that wd make the Horace quotation
    		germinal (or even seminal: two more months for the
    		revolutionary calendar?)
    
    	b	� I doubt it's possible to find a single originator.
    
    
    To clear up a question raised in 12 (and those who have already read my
    life history in another note can tune out at this stage), I was the
    [only full-time] researcher for the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
    (3rd edn, 1979). In my work I regarded the 2nd edn as an interesting
    point de d�part, which I often found to be wrong (as to any fairly 
    recent quotation); Bartlett and Stevenson similarly had their merits
    and demerits. If a Dictionary of Quotations listed something, the
    source was always suspect (if they got the reference right they
    quite often got the spelling or punctuation wrong, or omitted a
    significant chunk of the context); sometimes the compilers gave
    a `reference' that either couldn't be checked (because it didn't
    exist) or that they must have known to be wrong (but assumed nobody 
    would bother to check). Sometimes a wrong reference could be traced
    to a faulty or damaged source, or one that used some convention -
    as to numbering or pagination or organization - that differed from
    the one that's accepted now as the right one (as in the change from
    the Julian to the Gregorian calendar). 
    
    The 2nd edn of the ODQ was usually reliable for quotations from
    classical authors, and I now regard the 2nd edition as containing a lot
    of things that I feel should not have been dropped for the 3rd (mostly
    classical quotations), but the criteria for including anything in the
    3rd edition were very strict (see the Preface, if you're interested; I
    shan't attempt to summarize 30-odd pages of tight argument here).
    
    One of the things that we were careful to avoid (in the 3rd edn) was
    the firm attribution of a popular quotation to any one - fairly recent
    [i.e. since a few hundred years BC] - source, unless there was very
    firm  evidence. In a few cases we had to admit defeat; one case I can
    remember is `A week is a long time in politics' (which everyone,
    presumably rightly, ascribes to Harold Wilson, but for which we had to
    cite a secondary source). Another was `Not tonight, Josephine' (which
    must have been Napol�on Buonaparte, but never got reliably committed
    to paper by anyone - I suppose it just isn't the sort of thing that one 
    commits to paper).
    
    That lot - for the record - is what I tried to sum up, in .11, in the 
    words `when I was a quotations man'
    
    b

    re .14
    Seminal  could be a beautiful month, but perhaps tiring.
    
    roger

    "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is, I'm sure, attributable to Sir
    Isaac Newton, referring to such worthies as Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler,
    and Galileo.
    
    Chris

    Re: .16, .9, ...
    
    The third edition of _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_ attributes
    it to _both_ Isaac Newton:
    
    	If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of
    	giants.
    
    	 -- from a letter to Robert Hooke, 1675/6
    
    
    and to Bernard of Chartres:
    
    	Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the
    	shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and
    	things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness
        of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because
    	we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.
    
    	 -- John of Salisbury, _Metalogicon_ (1159)  See also
            R. K. Merton, _On the Shoulders of Giants_ (1965)
    
    Bernard of Colorado

    
    Who said this (or words to the effect):
    
    	"We will follow the truth wherever we lead it."
    
    -- Glinch

    Yes (.17).  You'll note that the ODQ takes care to say what is the
    case, but avoids saying `This is the first time it was used'. People
    often/usually attribute it to Newton, and he certainly used `shoulders
    of giants' metaphor; if ODQ says it was in that letter, it says so
    because I saw the letter (reprinted in some collection that didn't
    or couldn't place the exact date - see .14) But Newton didn't mention 
    dwarfs, as Bernard of Chartres did several hundred years earlier (I 
    don't think Newton was inclined to belittle himself in that sort of way).
    
    B of C was quite possibly not the first to use the metaphor; maybe he,
    like Newton after him, was just quoting a bit of ancient wisdom. As so
    often, a quotation thought to come from just one source has been
    kicking around for centuries.
    
    b

                        -< It wasn't Richard Nixon >-  
       Re: .18
                                                    
    > "We will follow the truth wherever we lead it."
       

       
       -bs

    Re: .19      
    
    I agree.  I don't know how the ODQ or any other compiler of quotations
    could assure us that they have identified the first use of a phrase or
    a metaphor.  Nor is that what they are attempting to do.
    
    Did you work on the ODQ and do research for them?  If so, my
    compliments; it is a supurb collection, well-indexed, and not a
    bad way to occupy the odd hour.
    
    Bernie

    Guilty, yer honour. I even got a credit (for the 3rd edn) - among many
    others.
    
    The index was one of OUP's first goes at involving computers in 
    anything aside from bean-counting and type-setting. Some CPU
    somewhere knew an algorithm that three/four of us applied in marking up
    the entries (go forward or back n characters from the keyword, ignoring
    punctuation unless it's a full stop, if and only  if ... etc). Then we
    just marked the keywords, and computicles did the rest. The compiler of
    the 2nd edn took several months to compile an index; we took a few
    days.  But there were a few drawbacks: we had to do Latin and Greek by
    hand, and the results of the computer one were sometimes less literate
    and helpful than we'd hoped, and needed some editing.
    
    �2051 per year; still, there was the job satisfaction.
    
    b

    
    "Age cannot wither, nor time diminish, the constant pleasure of her
    infinite variety." 
    
    ...or something like that.  My Bartlett's is of no help on this one.
    Does anyone recognize it?  Along with the source, context would be
    appreciated.
    
    Bill

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety; other women cloy
The appetites they feed;

Antony and Cleopatra Act II, scene II

(Context is gossip about why Antony won't leave Cleo...)

					I

This may be so paraphrased as to be unrecognizable, but I still want to 
know the source:

	"All men are right in that which they affirm and wrong in that which
	they deny."

Thanks,

Moffatt

    re .-1
        
>   This may be so paraphrased as to be unrecognizable,
>   "All men are right in that which they affirm and wrong in that which
>   they deny."
    
    Well, I've heard another version which is recognizable, but who
    knows if they might be a pair o' paraphrases of some other phrase.
    
    Arthur C. Clarke said something to the effect that if a famous but
    elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's probably
    right; while if a famous but elderly scientist says that something
    is impossible, he's probably wrong.
    
    I think I have messed up the adjectives somewhat, but I believe
    that the sexism is Clarke's.  (I mean, is his.)