We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.
—Oscar Wilde, 1887Quotes
The waters are nature’s storehouse, in which she locks up her wonders.
—Izaak Walton, 1653In every man is a wild beast; most of them don’t know how to hold it back, and the majority give it full rein when they are not restrained by terror of law.
—Frederick the Great, 1759It is impossible to please all the world and one’s father.
—Jean de La Fontaine, 1668Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, 1849One may like the love and despise the lover.
—George Farquhar, 1706I ride rough waters and shall sink with no one to save me.
—Virginia Woolf, 1931Is all our fire of shipwreck wood?
—Robert Browning, 1862Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard, c. 1987They exchange their home and sweet thresholds for exile, and seek under another sun another home.
—Virgil, c. 30 BCHistory in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one environment to another.
—Ellsworth Huntington, 1919There is only one antidote to mental suffering and that is physical pain.
—Karl Marx, 1860Ocean. A body of water occupying about two-thirds of a world made for man—who has no gills.
—Ambrose Bierce, 1906