If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
—Francis Bacon, 1625
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Quotes
Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it—have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.
—James Russell Lowell, 1884We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back whence we came.
—John F. Kennedy, 1962Curse on all laws but those which love has made.
—Alexander Pope, 1717These landscapes of water and reflection have become an obsession.
—Claude Monet, 1908A bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures.
—Seneca the Younger, c. 64Tomorrow we take to the mighty sea.
—Horace, 23 BCEvery individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.
—William James, 1902It would seem that in history it’s never a tooth for a tooth, but a thousand, a hundred thousand for one.
—Sybille Bedford, 1963Education has become a prisoner of contemporaneity. It is the past, not the dizzy present, that is the best door to the future.
—Camille Paglia, 1992As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
—Charles Darwin, 1859Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.
—G.K. Chesterton, 1910One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.
—E.B. White, 1977