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Quotes

I never even saw the use of the sea. Many a sad heart has it caused, and many a sick stomach has it occasioned! The boldest sailor climbs on board with a heavy soul and leaps on land with a light spirit.

—Benjamin Disraeli, 1827

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.

—Sydney Smith, 1855

It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.

—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast, for I intend to go in harm’s way.

—John Paul Jones, 1778

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

—John Berger, 1987

Many, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach from the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.

—Hans Christian Andersen, 1837

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, c. 1947

Honesty, for me, is usually the worst policy imaginable.

—Patricia Highsmith, 1960

All people have the common desire to be elevated in honor, but all people have something still more elevated in themselves without knowing it.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

Television is democracy at its ugliest.

—Paddy Chayefsky, 1976

The law is not the same at morning and at night.

—George Herbert, c. 1633

Whoever has died is freed from sin.

—St. Paul, c. 50