The elephant, although a gross beast, is yet the most decent and most sensible of any other upon earth. Although he never changes his female, and hath so tender a love for her whom he hath chosen, yet he never couples with her but at the end of every three years, and then only for the space of five days.
—St. Francis de Sales, 1609
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Quotes
Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.
—Zora Neale Hurston, 1937Style is the image of character.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1789Sanity is madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
—George Santayana, 1920Industrialism is the religion with “the machine” as the god going to answer all the prayers. Communism and capitalism were just competing sects.
—Dora Russell, 1983An irreligious man is not one who denies the gods of the majority, but one who applies to the gods the opinions of the majority. For what most men say about the gods are not ideas derived from sensation, but false opinions, according to which the greatest evils come to the wicked, and the greatest blessings come to the good from the gods.
—Epicurus, c. 250 BCMan is a noble animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the grave.
—Thomas Browne, 1658Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Which of these two has the grander view?
—Victor Hugo, 1862As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.
—John Donne, 1622Two crimes undid me: a poem and a mistake.
—Ovid, 10Seek not water, only show you are thirsty, / That water may spring up all around you.
—Rumi, c. 1260Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong, 1938The land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.
—The Bible