The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:
Whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
Or, rephrased as Simon did:
Anything worth doing is worth doing well.
I strongly recommend his letters to his son. They contain quite a bit of great advice- as well as politics and health and so on. As it was private advice given to an heir, most of it is fully sound.
(In fact, it’s been a while. I probably ought to find my copy and give it another read.)
Yeah, they’re on my reading list. My dad used to say that a lot, but I always said the truer version was ‘Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well’, since he was usually using it about worthless yardwork...
Yep, it seems that
often
epigrams are made more epigrammatic by the open-source process of people
misquoting them. I went looking up what I
thought was
another example of this, but Wiktionary calls it “[l]ikely
traditional”
(though the only other citation is roughly contemporary with Maslow).
--Herbert Simon (quoted by Pat Langley)
Including artificial intelligence? ;-)
The Chesterton version looks like it was designed to poke the older (and in my opinion better) advice from Lord Chesterfield:
Or, rephrased as Simon did:
I strongly recommend his letters to his son. They contain quite a bit of great advice- as well as politics and health and so on. As it was private advice given to an heir, most of it is fully sound.
(In fact, it’s been a while. I probably ought to find my copy and give it another read.)
Yeah, they’re on my reading list. My dad used to say that a lot, but I always said the truer version was ‘Anything not worth doing is not worth doing well’, since he was usually using it about worthless yardwork...
Ah, I was gonna mention this. Didn’t know it was from Chesterfield.
I think there’d be more musicians (a good thing IMO) if more people took Chesterton’s advice.
A favorite of mine, but according to Wikiquote G.K. Chesterton said it first, in chapter 14 of What’s Wrong With The World:
I like Simon’s version better: it flows without the awkward pause for the comma.
Yep, it seems that often epigrams are made more epigrammatic by the open-source process of people misquoting them. I went looking up what I thought was another example of this, but Wiktionary calls it “[l]ikely traditional” (though the only other citation is roughly contemporary with Maslow).
Memetics in action—survival of the most epigrammatic!