Quotes About Generalization

Generalizing extends our power and impoverishes our spirit.

There's always something fishy about the French.

We then discover that we have no word, corresponding to "poem" in poetry or "play" in drama, to describe a work of literary art. It is all very well for Blake to say that to generalize is to be an idiot, but when we find ourselves in the cultural situation of savages who have words for ash and willow and no word for tree, we wonder if there is not such a thing as being too deficient in the capacity to generalize.

There are one-story intellects, two-story intellects, and three-story intellects with skylights. All fact collectors with no aim beyond their facts are one-story men. Two-story men compare reason and generalize, using labors of the fact collectors as well as their own. Three-story men idealize, imagine, and predict. Their best illuminations come from above through the skylight.

I dare say that I have worked off my fundamental formula on you that the chief end of man is to frame general propositions and that no general proposition is worth a damn.

Forbear to lay the guilt of a few on the many.

Prior to any generalization about literature, literary texts have to be read, and the possibility of reading can never be taken for granted. It is an act of understanding that can never be observed, nor in any way prescribed or verified.

Your Paris is only a mudhole." To which Vautrin responds with a new generalization: "And a very strange mudhole," he says. "Those whose carriage gets muddy in its streets are respectable, those who get muddy on foot are crooks. Have the misfortune to snatch some trifle and you are put on display in the law courts. Steal a million, you're noted in the drawing rooms as a man of honor.

The superficial and the slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization.