Montage
Chapter & Verse
Correspondence on not-so-famous lost words
Carol Ochs seeks a citation for “All science, all religion began with the innovator, the nonconformist, the heretic.” She writes, “In the 1950s, it was on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review with a photo of a sculpture of a hand reaching up.”
Thomas Burrows hopes, after a half-century of searching, that someone can provide him with the source of the following assertion, delivered by Professor Frank Moore Cross during an elementary Hebrew course: “It was a saying of the ancient rabbis that you may as well learn Hebrew now because you will need it in the world to come.”
George Bason wishes to know who first declared, “Lazy people take the most pains,” and what he or she meant by it.
More queries from the archives:
“Words are walls between us / Difficult to scale— / Guardians of self / That make a jail.”
“Elephants coming two by two each as big as a launch in tow…”
“Memory is an old woman who saves dirty rags and throws away pearls and diamonds.”
“Admit impediments” (September-October [5]). Thomas Ehrlich was the first to identify this quotation from the sonnet “Admit impediments” written by Norma (Holzman) Farber, A.M. ’32, in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.