[Ads-l] "something greater than yourself"

[Jonathan Lighter]

A very well known phrase in recent decades.

Earliest?:

1888 Paolo Mantegazza _Testa: A Book for Boys_ (tr. L. D. Ventura; Boston:
Heath) 253:

And thus in your life...you should think much, always, of something great,
something infinite, which you cannot touch with your hands.  It may be the
God of religion, the God of beauty, or the God of goodness or of truth; no
matter, provided it be an infinite ideal, provided it be something greater
than yourself, which cannot be contaminated by the common interests of
daily life.

Mantegazza (1831-1910) was a noted Italian physician and anthropologist.


This appears to be the next earliest ex. - but it might have been published
earlier:

a1891 in Bernard Bosanquet _Essays and Addresses_ (London: Swan
Sonnenschein, 1891) 110:

This hope of finding peace, of resting your will in something greater than
yourself, of being at one with the good purpose of humanity, is the very
mainspring of life.


Bosanquet (1848-1923) was a well-known Oxfordian philosopher.

JL
-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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