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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 111
AUTHOR: Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936)
QUOTATION: That what is true of business and politics is gloriously true of the professions, the arts and crafts, the sciences, the sports. That the best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has to be discovered. We know only a few streaks about astronomy. We are only beginning to imagine the force and composition of the atom. Physics has not yet found any indivisible matter, or psychology a sensible soul.
ATTRIBUTION: LINCOLN STEFFENS, “This World Depression of Ours is Chock-full of Good News,” Hearst’s International Combined with Cosmopolitan, October 1932, p. 26. This is reprinted in his The World of Lincoln Steffens, ed. Ella Winter and Herbert Shapiro, p. 216 (1962).
SUBJECTS: Best