S.L. Zalburg would like to know who said "Know (or "Understand") too much and you're finished for life."
Howard Lewis Fink seeks the author of the statement "One cannot be sincere and seem so."
John Straub is looking for the source of the line "Maintenance is the curse of Western man."
Thomas Fuller requests the origin of the expression "Katie bar the door."
Howard Derrickson inquires about the origins of "Education should be like the moonrise, perceptible not in progress but in result," and "Ten thousand Swedes ran through the weeds, pursued by one Norwegian."
"awful, amusing, and artificial" (March-April 1994). George Ehrlich sent in William Safire's column, "Janus Lives," in the New York Times Magazine of May 4, 1997, which, on the authority of Richard Lederer's book Crazy English, attributes this critique to Queen Anne, who had just seen the completed St. Paul's Cathedral.
"what he does with his attention" (May-June). Mary Katherine Kelley suggests as a source the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, book vii, no. 3: "...every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself."
"rapture and despair" (May-June). Conrad Geller was first to identify this misremembered phrase from the fifth line of Edwin Markham's poem "The Man with the Hoe."
