Bartlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature

1489 Pages·2002·9.52 MB·English

by  John Bartlett

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B A R T L E T T ’ S
F A M I L I A R
Q U O T A T I O N S
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B A R T L E T T ’ S
F A M I L I A R
Q U O T A T I O N S
v
A collection of passages, phrases, and proverbs traced
to their sources in ancient and modern literature
SEVENTEENTH EDITION
John Bartlett
JUSTIN KAPLAN, GENERAL EDITOR
1 8 3 7
Little, Brown and Company
BOSTON NEW YORK LONDON
• •
Copyright 1882, 1891 by John Bartlett
Copyright 1910, 1914, 1919, 1942
by Anna Sprague DeWolf
and Louisa Bartlett Donaldson
Copyright 1937, 1948, © 1955, 1965, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2002
by Little, Brown and Company (Inc.)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review. Permission to use individual selections should
be obtained from the original publisher or copyright holder.
First Edition Published 1855
First Little, Brown Edition Published 1863
Seventeenth Edition Published 2002
First eBook Edition: October 2002
ISBN 0-7595-9777-4
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C O N T E N T S
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Preface to the Seventeenth Edition
vii
• •
Guide to the Use of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
xi
• •
Index of Authors
xv
• •
Familiar Quotations, from ancient Egypt
and the Bible to the present
3
• •
Index
865
• •
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P R E F A C E T O T H E
S E V E N T E E N T H E D I T I O N
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A CENTURY AND A HALF AGO, JOHN BARTLETT, A CAMBRIDGE, MASSA-
CHUSETTS, BOOKSELLER, EDITED AND SELF-PUBLISHED A 258-PAGE
volume of prose and verse passages titled A Collection of Familiar Quotations. The
quotations he chose came chiefly from the King James Bible, Shakespeare, and
British writers, but he also drew on the work of a few Americans, among them
Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant, as well as his friends and neighbors
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. A tireless reader and note-
taker, Bartlett had made himself over the years an information bank for the local aca-
demic and literary community, a resource for someone wanting to know who said
what, when, and where. Familiar Quotations,first issued in 1855 in a printing of one
thousand copies, grew out of the commonplace books in which Bartlett kept the an-
swers to frequently asked questions.
Bartlett sold his bookstore in 1863 and eventually became a partner in the
Boston publishing house of Little, Brown. The company added Familiar Quotations
to its list and, in subsequent revised and expanded editions, has been publishing it
continuously ever since. By the time of his death in 1905 at the age of eighty-five,
Bartlett had made his name as generic for quotations as Noah Webster’s for defini-
tions. Fame to the contrary, his gravestone in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery
is unadorned with quotations of any sort and bears only his name and dates.
“The object of this work,” Bartlett wrote in his original preface, “is to show, to
some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous
phrases and familiar quotations which have become ‘household words.’” Bartlett’s
modest collection, arranged chronologically by source date, evolved over the years
and under subsequent editors into a book with an unusual double nature. It is an an-
thology of choice passages (the Greek root word for “anthology” means a gathering
of flowers): a reading book, enjoyable in its own right and offering an informal intel-
lectual and cultural history that ranges in time from ancient Egypt to the modern era.
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations is also a reference book of first resort, like a dictionary
or atlas. But even as this book has gone from edition to edition, it could never claim
to be definitive, only up to date. To live up to its double nature it has had to remain
open to change and responsive to the taste, temper, and events of its time. This re-
quires shucking off tired or irrelevant quotations and replacing them with fresh mate-
rial that answers the needs of new generations of readers. Many newly added quotations
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viii Preface to the Seventeenth Edition
may turn out to have a life span of only years instead of centuries, but they belong
nonetheless. (However uncomfortably, former president Bill Clinton’s “I feel your
pain” shares houseroom in this book with Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be.”)
John Bartlett’s book remains literary in nature and loyal to prose and poetry
sources of a traditional kind. The Bible and Shakespeare are still major components,
just as they were in 1855. But recent editions have also broadened the cultural and
geographical scope of the book, by drawing on the movies, television, politics, cur-
rent events, and similar noncanonical or vernacular sources outside the bounds of
Bartlett’soriginal mandate of “ancient and modern literature.” The sixteenth edition
(1992) took large steps in this direction, at the price of disappointing a few readers
who expected to find high and polite culture represented exclusively and felt the bar-
barians had breached the gates. The seventeenth edition continues to cast a wide net
and at the same time reaffirms the traditional literary culture that is so gravely at risk.
It’s worth remembering that in the time of national shock and mourning that fol-
lowed the devastating events of September 11, 2001, it was poetry (for example,
W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939”) that many of us turned to for reassurance. As
U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins said at the time, we needed “a human voice speaking
directly in our ear.”
The seventeenth edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations incorporates a number
of significant changes in treatment and content. For the reader’s convenience, and in
order to unclutter the printed page, we’ve eliminated several hundred purely me-
chanical, nonsubstantive cross-references and footnotes. Similarly, we supply full cita-
tions of title and source in place of the traditional, often opaque and exasperating
“Ibid.” Around one hundred authors are represented here for the first time, among
them Eric Ambler and Mother Teresa, Paul Celan and Richard Feynman, Alfred
Hitchcock and Hillary Clinton, Jerry Seinfeld and J. K. Rowling, Isaiah Berlin and
Potter Stewart, Maya Angelou and Princess Diana, Margaret Atwood and Katharine
Graham, John Guare and Kingsley Amis. We give additional or enhanced space to
about two dozen authors included in previous editions. Some of them are Jane
Austen and Charles Darwin, Vladimir Nabokov and Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf
and Flannery O’Connor, Bob Dylan and Stephen Sondheim.
All of these author sources, however noncanonical by John Bartlett’s standards,
contribute to our common language of quotations and allusions. Directly or
obliquely, all of us speak this language without necessarily being aware of it. We say
“In my mind’s eye” and “All hell broke loose” without recognizing that we’re quot-
ing Hamlet and Paradise Lost. Quotations are a form of capsule history, a way of
summing up in a few words an entire era of event and spirit: for example, “With
malice toward none, with charity for all,” “The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself,” “Blood, toil, tears and sweat,” “I have a dream,” “I’m not a crook,” “Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” “Greed is good,” “Show me the money.” Quota-
tions, to borrow from the preface to the sixteenth edition, are “telegraphic, a form of
shorthand. We use them to lend point and luster to what we say. . . . We cherish and
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Preface to the Seventeenth Edition ix
like to repeat, simply for the reassurance they give, proverbs, nursery rhymes, song
lyrics, and the like that have so much talismanic force they function on a nearly pre-
intellectual level. We use quotations, like the Biblical Shibboleth, as passwords and
secret handshakes, socially strategic signals that say, ‘I understand you. We speak the
same language.’”
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations continues to welcome comments and nominations
from readers. For their generous help in preparing this new edition I thank the fol-
lowing: Alex Beam, Anne Bernays, Ralph C. Bledsoe, Andrew Boyd, Paul Brooks,
George Cronemiller, Peter Davison, John Dorenkamp, Carl Faith, Donald Fanger,
Malcolm M. Ferguson, Joseph Finder, the late Sally Fitzgerald, James Gleick, Ralph
Graves, Bill Grealish, John Guare, Scott Heller, Hester Kaplan, J. D. McClatchy,
Victor McIlheny, Herbert Mitgang, Cynthia Ozick, Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Pinsky,
Nigel Rees, Philip Rule, S.J., Stacy Schiff, Mary Schmich, Heidi Jon Schmidt, Ralph
Sipper, Eugene R. Sullivan, John M. Taylor, John Updike, and Helen Whall.
At Little, Brown, it’s been a privilege to work with Pamela Marshall and to have
the benefit of her vigilance, scholarship, and professional skill. We salute the memory
of Betsy Pitha, longtime chief copyeditor, whose high standards for this book we’ve
tried to uphold.
JUSTIN KAPLAN
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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