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Quotes

There be beasts that, at a year old, observe more, and pursue that which is for their good more prudently, than a child can do at ten.

—Thomas Hobbes, 1651

Nature has planted in our minds an insatiable desire to seek the truth.

—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BC

Credulity forges more miracles than trickery could invent.

—Joseph Joubert, 1811

Trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay.

—Oliver Goldsmith, 1770

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

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870

Being thus arrived in good harbor, and brought safe to land, they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from all the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stale earth, their proper element.

—William Bradford, 1630

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

Rivalry is the whetstone of talent.

—Roman proverb

Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain there would be no life.

—John Updike, 1989

The tune I remember, could I but keep the words.

—Virgil, 38 BC

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

—L.P. Hartley, 1953

Fear has a smell, as love does.

—Margaret Atwood, 1972

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928