Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other both in mind and body, to try the manners of different nations, to hear the chimes at midnight.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881
Archive
Quotes
I’ve been on more laps than a napkin.
—Mae WestI am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes, 1679Death renders all equal.
—Claudian, c. 395Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
—Jerome K. Jerome, 1889Man and animals are really the conduit of food, the sepulcher of animals, and resting place of the dead, one causing the death of the other, making themselves the covering for the corruption of other dead bodies.
—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1500Language is the armory of the human mind and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1817What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.
—Henry David Thoreau, 1850To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma.
—Gretel Ehrlich, 1994I detest war. It spoils armies.
—Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, c. 1820If I see something sagging, dragging, or bagging, I’m going to go have the stuff tucked or plucked.
—Dolly Parton, 2003The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.
—Anthony Burgess, 1972Think where man’s glory most begins and ends, / And say my glory was I had such friends.
—W.B. Yeats, 1937