Browsing Topic Best Summing Up Quotes

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

I want to know that I’ve accomplished something. I want to feel that it had some meaning. At the last summing up, I want to be sure it wasn’t all-for nothing.

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed,and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.

Reason exercises merely the function of preserving order, is, so to say, the police in the region of art. In life it is mostly a cold arithmetician summing up our follies.

For the Fall of the year is more than three months bounded by an equinox and a solstice. It is a summing up without the finality of year’s end.

[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

I want to make a summing up, brief and to the point, but thorough. I have never suppressed a word in my books out of regard for other people and their prejudices.

An intelligently planned feast is like a summing up of the whole world, where each part is represented by its envoys.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas the whole-part relationship is meaningful.

Evil is a necessary part of the order of the universe.

Habits in writing as in life are only useful if they are broken as soon as they cease to be advantageous.

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life’s ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.

In all modesty, my summing up of 1955-6 and 1956-7 must be that no club in the country could live with Manchester United.

Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.