My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.
—Quentin Crisp, 1968
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Quotes
The nature of God is a circle, of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.
—Empedocles, c. 450 BCNature is the art of God.
—Thomas Browne, 1635Because the newer methods of treatment are good, it does not follow that the old ones were bad: for if our honorable and worshipful ancestors had not recovered from their ailments, you and I would not be here today.
—Confucius, c. 515 BCThe sick man is the parasite of society.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?
—Olive Schreiner, 1883The happy ending is our national belief.
—Mary McCarthy, 1947We seek with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world.
—Marcus Tullius Cicero, 45 BCA fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education.
—George Bernard Shaw, 1903If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.
—Kurt Vonnegut, 1988Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.
—William Blake, c. 1790Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.
—Walter Scott, 1823There lurks in every human heart a desire of distinction which inclines every man first to hope and then to believe that nature has given him something peculiar to himself.
—Samuel Johnson, 1763