Archive

Quotes

O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!

—William Shakespeare, c. 1596

Are we not ourselves nature, nature without end?

—Stanisław Lem, 1961

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

—Novatian, c. 255

What will not attract a man’s stare at sea?—a gull, a turtle, a flying fish!

—Richard Burton, 1883

Life is a farce, and should not end with a mourning scene.

—Horace Walpole, 1784

The wonderful sea charmed me from the first.

—Joshua Slocum, 1900

If the bird does like its cage, and does like its sugar, and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?

—Olive Schreiner, 1883

I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.

—William Drummond, 1616

Again, men in general desire the good, and not merely what their fathers had.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

Do you suppose it possible to know democracy without knowing the people?

—Xenophon, c. 370 BC

I shall curse you with book and bell and candle.

—Thomas Malory, c. 1470

All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people.

—Antonín Dvořák, 1893

Why 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, 1821