Chapter and Verse

Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words

Aron Golberg requests a source for “I don’t mind your thinking you are a poached egg, as long as you don’t make me sit on pieces of hot buttered toast.” He notes that “the first few words may be in error, but the rest is accurate.”

David Rigney hopes someone can provide a source (Gandhi has been suggested) and original wording for the assertion, “Always act in such a way as to not reduce the self-respect of the opponent.”

“…this is supernuts” (May-June). Daniel Rosenberg located an attribution to the mathematician Richard Courant in a June 4, 2000, New York Times article, “There’s One Born Every Minute,” by the same Ed Regis who wrote Who Got Einstein’s Office.

“A generalization is useful” (July-August). Bernard Witlieb identified one potential—but less elegantly phrased— source, tracked down not in a work by Henry James but in his brother William’s lecture series published as The Variety of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. The relevant text, from “Lecture X: Conversion,” states, “One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor [Louis] Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one’s acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in”—suggesting Agassiz as the original source.

Send inquiries and answers to “Chapter and Verse,” Harvard Magazine, 7 Ware Street, Cambridge 02138 or via e-mail to chapterandverse@harvardmag.com.

Click here for the September-October 2015 issue table of contents

You might also like

The 2025 Pulitzer Prizes Announced

Winners across five categories, from commentary on Gaza to criticism on public architecture

Off the Shelf

Operatic counterculture, a Passover graphic novel, James Joyce’s biographer, and more

Ben Franklin’s Project

Historian Joyce E. Chaplin reinterprets an early era of invention, industrialization, and climate challenge

Most popular

Rebecca Henderson: Does Capitalism Need to be Reimagined?

How to reform capitalism to confront climate change and extreme inequality, with economist and McArthur University Professor Rebecca Henderson

The New Gender Gaps

What to do as men and boys fall behind

An Original Magna Carta, Hidden in Plain Sight

A rare original surfaces at Harvard at an “almost providential” moment. 

Explore More From Current Issue

Jessica Shand—Math and Music at Harvard

Jessica Shand blends math and music.

Short Headlines from Harvard's History

Seniors’ uncertain future c. 1940, Harvard Law Review news, and more