I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility — I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.
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The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, vol. 1, p. 8, journal entry, 1768.Frances Burney
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The giraffe's neck supposedly supplies a crucial example for preferring natural selection over Lamarckism as a cause of evolution. But Darwin himself (however wrongly by later judgement) did not deny the Lamarckian principle of inheritance for characters acquired by use or lost by disuse. He regarded the Lamarckian mechanism as weak, infrequent, and entirely subsidiary to natural selection, but he accepted the validity of evolution by use and disuse. Darwin does speculate about the adaptive advantage of giraffe's necks, but he cites both natural selection and Lamarckism as probable causes of elongation.
Stephen Jay Gould
Accius was a writer of tragedies, and being once asked why he, whose dialogue was celebrated for its energy, did not engage in the practice at the bar, answered, because in his tragedies he could make his characters say what he pleased; but that at the bar he should have to contend with persons who would say anything but what he pleased.
Lucius Accius
Goodness shows itself in behaviour and action and in relationship. Generally our daily behaviour is based on either the following of certain patterns — mechanical and therefore superficial — or according to very carefully thought-out motive, based on reward or punishment. So our behaviour, consciously or unconsciously, is calculated. This is not good behaviour. When one realizes this, not merely intellectually or by putting words together, then out of this total negation comes true behaviour.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
To insist that mind is originally passive and empty was one way of glorifying te possibilities of education. If the mind was a wax tablet to be written upon by objects, there were no limits to the possibility of education by means of the natural environment. And since the natural world of objects is a scene of harmonious "truth," this the education would infallibly produce minds filled with the truth.
John Dewey
We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.
Maria Edgeworth
Burney, Frances
Burney, Charles
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