Tis e'er the wont of simple folk to prize the deed and overlook the motive and of learned folk to discount the deed and lay open the soul of the doer.

John Barth
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  2. Top 15 Things Money Can’t BuyTime. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity. - Roy T. Bennett

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  4. The best index to a person's character is how he treats people who can't do him any good, and how he treats people who can't fight back. - Abigail Van Buren

  5. Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life – is the source from which self-respect springs. - Joan Didion

More Quotes By John Barth
  1. The difference ‘twixt poet and coxcomb is precisely that the latter stops gaps like a ship fitter caulking seams, merely to keep the boat afloat, while the former doth his work as doth a man with a maid: he fills the gap, but with vigor,...

  2. The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse, ' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' --...

  3. Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

  4. Ah, God, it were an easy Matter to choose a Calling hadone all Time to live in! I should be fifty Years a Barrister, fifty a Physician, fifty a Clergyman, fifty a Soldier! Aye, and fifty a Thief, and fifty a Judge! AllRoads are fine...

  5. Unhappily, things get clearer as we go along. I perceive that I have no body. What's less, I've been speaking of myself without delight or alternative as self-consciousness pure and sour; I declare now that even that isn't true. I'm not aware of myself at...

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