Quote#Wisdom
It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing…
Quote byJohn Clark Ridpath · 1840–1900
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Ch. 5. The Ethnological Argument, p. 127.
English (original)
It is as difficult to reach a common original for all existing linguistic forms as it is to find a common ancestry for the cave dwellers of Western Europe, the native Australians, the blubber-eating Esquimaux, and the flint-chipping barbarians of Polynesia.
— John Clark Ridpath
More from John Clark Ridpath
Ethnic history...regards the human being as a maker—a maker of houses first, and of all things afterwards.
Man is a speaking animal. No other characteristic of his nature is more universal or prevailing. Speech is the invariable index of the intellectual and moral condition of the human kind.
Ethnic history is especially rich in the suggestions which it offers for illustration. It seems to call loudly for drawings and type-pictures and charts, to the end of a clearer and more vivid apprehension of the subject under …
We are now at the beginning of a vast and varied scholarship devoted to an exposition of the human family, and of the various parts into which our race has differentiated.
The author...does not flatter himself that he has greatly enlarged the boundaries of human knowledge, but claims rather to have cleared somewhat the horizon in this part and in that, to have visited in thought and reflection some …
At length...man...emerges into the domain of the higher arts. Here he becomes truly ideal. Here he adorns as well as constructs. Here by the use of color and form he gives outline and substance to the things perceived in vision and dream.