Famous quotes containing the words essential, selection and/or spring:
“[A person] is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving that he does perceive.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“Every writer is necessarily a critic—that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.... The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg—nine-tenths of him is under water.”
—Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)
“The buds swell imperceptibly, without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring days were an eternity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)