Archive

Quotes

My interest is in the future, because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.

—Charles F. Kettering, 1946

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.

—Arthur Koestler, 1967

Ocean. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills.

—Ambrose Bierce, 1906

Take back your golden fiddles, and we’ll beat to open sea.

—Rudyard Kipling, 1892

I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.

—Antonio Porchia, 1943

The only function of a school is to make self-education easier.

—Isaac Asimov, 1974

The most advanced nations are always those who navigate the most.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

Ashore it’s wine, women, and song; aboard it’s rum, bum, and concertina.

—British naval saying, c. 1800

Profit is profit even in Mecca.

—Nigerian proverb

The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.

—James Joyce, 1922

The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station.

—Hunter S. Thompson, 1971

God is our father, but even more is God our mother.

—Pope John Paul I, 1978

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.

—Lawrence Durrell, 1957