(3089/898) That old demon

4) He felt old and miserable, going through life trying to peddle a personality of which people would not even accept a free sample.

Cyril Connolly
The Rock Pool (1936)

5) A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said today. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self Reliance (1841) [B15]

6) Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.

Aldous Huxley
"Wordsworth in the Tropics" in
Do What You Will (1929) [CQ]

7) Consistency is a virtue for trains: what we want from a philosopher is insights, whether he comes by them consistently or not.

Stephen Vizinczey
"Good Faith and Bad" in
London Sunday Telegraph (4/21/1974)
reprinted in
Truth and Lies in Literature (1986) [CQ]

8) Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Oscar Wilde
"The Relation of Dress to Art" in
Pall Mall Gazette (2/28/1885)
reprinted in Aristotle at Afternoon Tea:
The Rare Oscar Wilde (1991) [CQ]

9) Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

[George] Bernard Shaw
quoted by Michael Holroyd in
Bernard Shaw: The Lure of Fantasy (1991)

10) The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
"The Crack-Up" in
Esquire magazine (2/36) [CQ]

11) If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.

Miguel de Unamuno
quoted by Douglas R. Hofstadter in
Godel, Escher, Bach (1979)

[Note cf. #852 Berenson, #877 Robbins]

Sources

[B15] - Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th edition (1980)
[CQ] - The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)


Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 897 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.