In Literature
"Vespasian's axiom" is referred to in passing in the Balzac short story Sarrasine in connection with the mysterious origins of the wealth of a Parisian family. The proverb receives some attention in Roland Barthes' detailed analysis of the Balzac story in his critical study S/Z. It is possible that F. Scott Fitzgerald alludes to Vespasian's jest in The Great Gatsby with the phrase "non-olfactory money."
In That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis, the Warden of Bracton College is given the nickname "Non-Olet" for having written "a monumental report on National Sanitation. The subject had, if anything, rather recommended him to the Progressive Element. They regarded it as a slap in the face for the dilettanti and Die-hards, who replied by christening their new Warden Non-Olet."
Read more about this topic: Pecunia Non Olet
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Scholarship cannot do without literature.... It needs literature to float it, to set it current, to authenticate it to all the race, to get it out of closets and into the brains of men who stir abroad.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)