The Quotes canon
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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Mark Twain24 quotes
Imagination labors best in distant fields. — Mark Twain · 1869Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it. — Mark Twain · 1897Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. — Mark Twain · 1897True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god. — Mark Twain · 1897The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds. — Mark Twain · 1897Prosperity is the best protector of principle. — Mark Twain · 1897All 24 quotes →Jonathan Swift6 quotes
Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent as when they are at stool. — Jonathan Swift · 1726He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. — Jonathan Swift · 1726I said there was a society of men among us bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. — Jonathan Swift · 1726They will never allow that a child is under any obligation to his father for begetting him, or his mother for bringing him into the world - which, considering the miseries of human life, was neither a benefit in itself nor intended so by his parents, whose thoughts in their love encounters were otherwise employed. — Jonathan Swift · 1726Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together. — Jonathan Swift · 1726I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. — Jonathan Swift · 1726Robert Louis Stevenson6 quotes
There are no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1883We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world....and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1879To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1882So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1872Every one lives by selling something. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1892For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. — Robert Louis Stevenson · 1879Samuel Johnson3 quotes
A lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause which he undertakes, unless his client asks his opinion, and then he is bound to give it honestly. The justice or injustice of the cause is to be decided by the judge. — Samuel Johnson · 1773I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations. — Samuel Johnson · 1773Why, sir, a man grows better humoured as he grows older. He improves by experience. When young, he thinks himself of great consequence, and every thing of importance. As he advances in life, he learns to think himself of no consequence, and little things of little importance; and so he becomes more patient, and better pleased. — Samuel Johnson · 1773Thomas Fuller (churchman)3 quotes
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate... Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642Light (God's eldest daughter), is a principal beauty in a building. — Thomas Fuller (churchman) · 1642Francis Bacon2 quotes
When a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him. — Francis Bacon · 1625Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel. — Francis Bacon · 1625William Hazlitt2 quotes
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. — William Hazlitt · 1822One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey, but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone. — William Hazlitt · 1822Aldous Huxley1 quote
It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well. — Aldous Huxley · 1925Astolphe de Custine1 quote
Whoever has really seen Russia will find himself content to live anywhere else. It is always good to know that a society exists where no happiness is possible because, by a law of nature, man cannot be happy unless he is free. — Astolphe de Custine · 1843Bernard De Voto1 quote
The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire. — Bernard De Voto · 1943Bill Bryson1 quote
What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place. — Bill Bryson · 1991David Livingstone1 quote
No permanent elevation of a people can be effected without commerce. — David Livingstone · 1861Edward Abbey1 quote
Why this cult of wilderness?... Peace is often mentioned; beauty; spiritual refreshment, whatever that means; re-creation for the soul, whatever that is; escape; novelty, the delight of something different; truth and understanding and wisdom-commendable virtues in any man, anytime; ecology and all that, meaning the salvation of variety, diversity, possibility and potentiality, the preservation of the genetic reservoir, the answers to questions that we have not yet even learned to ask, a connection to the origin of things, an opening into the future, a source of sanity for the present-all true, all wonderful, all more than enough to answer such a dumb dead degrading question as "Why wilderness?" To which, nevertheless, I shall append one further answer anyway: because we like the taste of freedom; because we like the smell of danger. — Edward Abbey · 1971Elliot Paul1 quote
The last time I see Paris will be on the day I die. The city was inexhaustible, and so is its memory. — Elliot Paul · 1942Henry David Thoreau1 quote
A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end. — Henry David Thoreau · 1849Henry Major Tomlinson1 quote
As to the sea itself, love it you cannot. Why should you? I will never believe again the sea was ever loved by anyone whose life was married to it. It is the creation of Omnipotence, which is not of humankind and understandable, and so the springs of its behavior are hidden. — Henry Major Tomlinson · 1912Henry Miller1 quote
It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how... And still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss. — Henry Miller · 1941James Boswell1 quote
My definition of Man is, "a Cooking Animal." The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook... Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats. — James Boswell · 1773Laurens van der Post1 quote
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. — Laurens van der Post · 1958Matsuo Basho1 quote
The months and days are the travelers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers... I too for years past have been stirred by the sight of a solitary cloud drifting with the wind to ceaseless thoughts of roaming. — Matsuo Basho · 1694Rebecca West1 quote
Were I to... Take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, "In your lifetime, have you known peace?" wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in turn into his father, I would never hear the word "yes" if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. — Rebecca West · 1941William Least Heat-Moon1 quote
On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dark-times neither day nor night-the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they cast a mysterious shadow of blue, and it's that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself. — William Least Heat-Moon · 1982