Of all objects that I have ever seen, there is none which affects my imagination so much as the sea or ocean. A troubled ocean, to a man who sails upon it, is, I think, the biggest object that he can see in motion, and consequently gives his imagination one of the highest kinds of pleasure that can arise from greatness.
—Joseph Addison, 1712
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Quotes
’Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.
—William Shakespeare, c. 1595Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.
—Horace Walpole, 1784If a patient is poor, he is committed to a public hospital as “psychotic”; if he can afford the luxury of a private sanitarium, he is put there with the diagnosis of “neurasthenia”; if he is wealthy enough to be isolated in his own home under constant watch of nurses and physicians, he is simply an indisposed “eccentric.”
—Pierre Marie Janet, 1930If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it by conversation.
—Oscar Wilde, 1890Revolution begins in putting on bright colors.
—Tennessee Williams, 1944Why is a ship under sail more poetical than a hog in a high wind? The hog is all nature, the ship is all art.
—Lord Byron, 1821A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.
—Herman Melville, 1851To outwit an enemy is not only just and glorious but profitable and sweet.
—Plutarch, c. 100It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
—Dolores Ibárruri, 1936The legislator is like the navigator of a ship on the high seas. He can steer the vessel on which he sails, but he cannot alter its construction, raise the wind, or stop the waves from swelling beneath his feet.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.
—David Foster Wallace, 2000An electoral choice of ten different fascists is like choosing which way one wishes to die.
—George Jackson, 1971