Tend

Famous quotes containing the word tend:

    All ... forms of consensus about “great” books and “perennial” problems, once stabilized, tend to deteriorate eventually into something philistine. The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of “what is already known.” Those great books don’t only need custodians and transmitters. To stay alive, they also need adversaries. The most interesting ideas are heresies.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    Alas! What boots it with uncessant care
    To tend the homely slighted shepherd’s trade,
    And strictly meditate the thankless Muse?
    Were it not better done as others use,
    To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
    Hid in the tangles of Neaera’s hair?
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit towards which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief, which concordance the abstract statement may possess by virtue of the confession of its inaccuracy and one-sidedness, and this confession is an essential ingredient of truth.
    Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)