William James? Ralph Barton Perry? Henry James? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: I have been working to confirm the source and accuracy of a quotation that is attributed to the famous philosopher and educator William James. Here are three versions:

1. The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
2. The best use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
3. The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.

A version of this saying was listed in the Wikipedia entry for James, but more recently it has been removed. Perhaps you can verify this quote and determine the correct version.

Quote Investigator: William James died in 1920, and the earliest evidence QI has located for this statement is in the reference work “The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, Together with His Published Writings” which was released in 1935. This massive two volume compendium included a large amount of material written by James that was not published during his lifetime. Extensive notes and annotations were provided that carefully listed sources and dates. A version of the quotation was presented together with a year, but oddly no source was given by the editor Ralph Barton Perry. The precise wording differed from the three instances given by the questioner: ¹

“The great use of a life,” James said in 1900, “is to spend it for something that outlasts it.” This outlasting cause was then, as in earlier days, the happiness of mankind.

QI has not yet identified a text dating to 1900 containing the quote, and does not know why the editor did not provide a footnote or annotation for the saying.

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

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Pablo Casals? Apocryphal?

Dear Quote Investigator: I am hoping you will be interested in researching the following quote:

Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what the world needs most. It is not complicated but takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.

It’s all over the web and is attributed to Pablo Casals.

Quote Investigator: The common modern version of the quotation provided by the questioner has been slightly modified from the original statement which was indeed spoken by the renowned cellist Pablo Casals. In December 1959 a profile and interview of Casals by the journalist and activist Norman Cousins was published in The Saturday Review magazine. In the article Casals was referred to as Don Pablo, and the quotation used the word “man” instead of “person”. Here is an excerpt with more context: ¹

“The answer to helplessness is not so very complicated,” Don Pablo said. “A man can do something for peace without having to jump into politics. Each man has inside him a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a man to listen to his own goodness and act on it. Do we dare to be ourselves? This is the question that counts—and not, must a man be helpless?”

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

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Shake? William Shakespeare? Mulleary? Go-ethe? Henry Cuyler Bunner? Anonymous?

Dear Quote Investigator: While studying English in school I heard the following humorous rhyme about The Bard of Avon:

Shakespeare was a dramatist of note who lived by writing things to quote.

These words are from a longer poem, but I have not been able to locate it. Could you trace this phrase?

Quote Investigator: The full poem was titled “Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe” and the subject was three famous literary figures: William Shakespeare, Molière (stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was published in the humor magazine Puck in 1880, and the author was listed as “V. Hugo Dusenbury”. But that name was a pseudonym for Henry Cuyler Bunner who was the long-time editor of Puck.

Below is the second stanza of the poem containing the lines about Shakespeare who was referred to as “Shake”. The author of the poem discussed busts of Shakespeare, Molière, and Goethe on top of a bookcase. The illustration that accompanied the piece is shown at the beginning of this article: ¹

Shake was a dramatist of note;
He lived by writing things to quote.
He long ago put on his shroud:
Some of his works are rather loud.
His bald-spot’s dusty, I suppose.
I know there’s dust upon his nose.
I’ll have to give each nose a sheath–
Shake, Mulleary and Go-ethe.

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Yogi Berra? Babe Herman? Department Store Sales Woman? Young Student? Apocryphal?

Dear Quote Investigator: My favorite quotation from Yogi Berra was said when he was introduced to a beautiful model after a baseball game. She complimented him, and his fumbling reply was unintentionally funny:

She said, “You look so nice and cool in that white uniform.”
He said, “Thanks! You don’t look so hot yourself.”

Is this anecdote accurate?

Quote Investigator: This type of comical tale has a long history. In 1934 a newspaper in Illinois printed a version in which the two participants were a “young woman of our village” and a sales woman: ¹

It was a hot day. She had gone to a department store office to pay her bill, and, impressed by the crisp, fresh appearance of the girl behind the counter, she had exclaimed, “My, but you look cool.” And the girl had gazed across the counter and replied briskly, “You don’t look so hot yourself.”

In July 1937 a New York newspaper printed a version of the story that featured members of the opposite sex. Once again the tale was presented as a humorous piece of non-fiction: ²

Few stories of the recent heat wave to equal that dug up by Mark Hellinger, who tells about the conversational difficulty of the young man and young woman who had to resort to the old standby, the weather.
“You don’t appear to be minding the heat,” was her gracious lead.
He tried his best to think of a complimentary comeback, but the words did not come. Finally he thought of one.
“Well, you don’t look so hot yourself,” he told her. And then the air grew much cooler.

Eventually, a jocular story of this type was told about a baseball player. Interestingly, the first player who appeared in this anecdote was Babe Herman and not Yogi Berra. An instance featuring Herman was published in 1951, and an instance with Yogi was published in 1956. Details are given further below.

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

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Yogi Berra? Apocryphal?

Dear Quote Investigator: While looking through a book of baseball’s greatest quotations I came across this hilarious reply from Yogi Berra to someone who criticized his appearance:

So I’m ugly. So what? I never saw anyone hit with his face.

Some of the sayings credited to Yogi are bogus, but I hope this one is real. What do you think?

Quote Investigator: There is good evidence starting in 1948 that Yogi did make this quip. The book “Yankee Doodles” by the sports writer Milton Gross contained a collection of profiles of New York Yankee baseball players. The chapter on Yogi contained the following: ¹

Yogi may be many things to many people, but he’s not a dope. An amiable youngster, Yogi feels that when his teammates stop kidding him half the pleasure of life will be gone. When they remind him that he’s ugly, Yogi has a pat answer.

“It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball and I never saw anybody hit one with his face.”

In 1949 the popular magazine “Collier’s Weekly” published a profile of the ballplayer titled: “Yankee Yogi: I’m Human, Ain’t I?” by the journalist Gordon Manning. Yogi was quoted presenting a very similar quip with the word “anybody” replaced by “nobody”: ²

But Yogi, an amiable guy of twenty-four and the absolute favorite of everybody in the clubhouse, brushes off those who rib him about his ugliness.

“It don’t matter if you’re ugly in this racket,” he says. “All you gotta do is hit the ball, and I never saw nobody hit one with his face.”

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

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P. T. Barnum? Britney Spears? George Herbert? Jane Russell? W. Clement Stone? Ralph Waldo Emerson? Norman Vincent Peale? Les Brown? John McEnroe?

Dear Quote Investigator: There exists a collection of sayings that uses celestial bodies to illustrate advice about setting goals. Here are three examples:

1. If I shoot at the sun, I may hit a star.
2. If we aim at the moon—we may hit a star!
3. Shoot for the moon. If you miss it, you will still land among the stars.

The moon and sun are impressive objects in the sky while the stars are less luminous and therefore not as visually striking. Hence, I think that these adages mean the following: If you set a very difficult goal for yourself then even if you are only partially successful you will find that the result is still superb.

Modern astronomical knowledge makes the sayings more difficult to interpret. Stars (other than the sun) are much farther away from the Earth than the sun or the moon. Hence, hitting a star is actually much more difficult than hitting the sun or moon. Indeed, there is another set of aphorisms that switches the role of the moon and the stars:

1. If you don’t aim for the stars, you’re not going to get to the moon.
2. I’ll shoot for the stars, and I’ll settle for the moon.

These types of sayings have been credited to P. T. Barnum, Norman Vincent Peale, and others. Could you examine this class of quotations?

Quote Investigator: An important precursor to this collection of sayings was written by the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert who died in 1633. In the poem “The Church-Porch” a verse exhorted the reader to be humble but also to “aimeth at the sky”. Herbert contended that one would achieve more by targeting the sky instead of adopting the easier task of aiming at a tree: ¹

Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high;
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be:
Sink not in spirit; who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much, than he that means a tree.
A grain of glory mix’d with humbleness
Cures both a Fever, and Lethargickness.

The advice that one should aim at the moon to achieve something great has been proffered for many years. In 1846 an instance of this type of guidance suggested that one may not hit the moon but still “hit a high mark”. The following words were credited to George Herbert, and QI hypothesizes that this expression evolved from Herbert’s verse given above: ²

…still George Herbert’s advice on a higher matter is applicable to this, that we had better shoot at the moon if we want to hit a high mark.

In 1859 an expression of this kind was already labeled an “old saying”. In the following excerpt the result of shooting at the moon was not as impressive as landing among the stars; nevertheless, it was portrayed as desirable: ³

You remember the old saying, Beatrice, “Shoot at the moon and you will hit the top of the highest tree.” If you could not be a genius you may, nevertheless, have made greater progress by the effort to be one.

In 1865 a statement mentioned shooting at the stars instead of the moon. The conceptual pattern of the aphorism was the same. The result of pursuing an exalted goal was the achievement of a less impressive but useful goal: ⁴

Probably the ingenious author goes on the principle that if you shoot at the stars you may hit a tree. If you cram your novel with Cabinet Ministers and Latin and Greek and Lafitte, you may get the public to listen to your substantial but prosaic grievance, that an inmate of Whitecross Street prison may not receive visitors on a Sunday.

In 1876 another astronomical object was presented as an unreachable but valuable aspirational target: the sun: ⁵

Again, he would say, “shoot an arrow at the sun every morning.” “But we can’t hit it,” was the answer. “You will hit higher than if you aimed lower,” he would reply.

In 1879 the name of George Herbert was invoked again. This time the saying credited to him concerned the moon and a tree: ⁶

This was an ideal scheme, but nothing great is ever accomplished by the man who has not a high ideal: and George Herbert’s words were never forgotten by the bishop, “that it is good to shoot at the moon even though you only hit a tree.”

Finally, in 1891 an expression matching a version given by the questioner was printed in a collection of quotations and short writings that had been “Compiled by Ladies of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland, California”. The words were ascribed to the famous American showman Phineas T. Barnum: ⁷

If I shoot at the sun, I may hit a star.
—P. T. Barnum

Here are additional selected citations in chronological order.

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Martin Luther King? Barack Obama? Theodore Parker? Freemason Commander? Seth Brooks? Jacob Kohn?

Dear Quote Investigator: Civil rights champion Martin Luther King, Jr. once delivered a powerful speech with this resonant line:

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I was told that this metaphorical framework has a long history that stretches back to the 19th century. Could you examine this topic?

Quote Investigator: Theodore Parker was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810 who called for the abolition of slavery. In 1857 a collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion” by Parker was published and the third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe: