Anatomy of a Quote
What makes a quote good? I don’t know, but hopefully, at the end of this blog, I will know.
My .bashrc contains a script to print out a quote, among other things, when I first load up my terminal. The quote list itself is a hodgepodge of many quote .txt files I searched through. So there isn’t any centralized theme to them besides, they are “deep?” Every time I open up my terminal, I get a pretty thought-provoking quote before working on code or writing this blog. But I wonder: What is the structure of a good quote?
To give an idea of what they look like:
“It’s not about how hard you can hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” – Rocky Balboa, Rocky
“To see things in the seed, that is genius.” – Lao Tzu
“Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation… even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind.” – Leonardo da Vinci
At first thought, I saw three broad categories under which a “good” quote could fall: motivational, insightful, and reflective. Sort of like the primary “substance” of a quote, what the “good stuff” is in a quote. Then, you have the linguistic structure, which relies on the rhetorical skills of the quotee, such as how many words it uses, how it flows, etc. Another key factor in a good quote is the writer. It may be wrong, but who the person is and is not definitely adds weight to the quote.
In the end, though, the crucial aspect is how much the quote and its idea align with our point of view. If what is a quote is treated as either what is beautiful or what is true, Then the field of ethics and aesthetics would, for the most part, agree with me on what a good quote is: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” and “there are no universal ethical truths.”1
Take the da Vinci or Rocky quote. Both of them motivate towards a go-getting and move-forward attitude. As a motivating force, that is perfectly fine to me. Go you! But, taking quotes beyond face level gives me a sense of unease. The da Vinci quote makes good points about needing to be in flux. But what about the importance of resting da Vinci? Inaction need not be negative. And to Rocky: doesn’t being too persistent lead to being hard-headed?
Borrowing from ethics, these motivational quotes tend to be normative statements. Normative statements prescribe what you ought to do. Rocky says to get back up and persevere. Da Vinci says to be active in life. Why? Because it is virtuous to do so. The other type is called positive statements. These statements describe or say something of the world. Laozi’s quote is a positive statement. It describes what a genius is and the functions of a genius.
Given that distinction, the most dangerous/implicated of the two are normative quotes.
I might’ve missed some other parts of the assemblage,2, but I hope I captured the main aspects.