“Why do you lead me a wild-goose chase?”
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 6.
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Miguel de Cervantes178
Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright 1547–1616Related quotes
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)
1851
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)
Context: Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living
Source: The Importance of Living (1937), Ch. I : The Awakening, p. 4
“5222. To run the Wild-Goose Chace.”
Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Tad Williams (1957) novelist
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 1, Chapter 20, “Travelers and Messengers” (p. 636).
Robert Burns My Heart's in the Highlands
My Heart's in the Highlands, st. 1
Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1796)
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer
"The Summer Day"
New and Selected Poems (1992)
Variant: What will you do with your one precious, wild life?
Source: New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1
"Ode to the Goose" http://www.chinese-poems.com/lbw1.html (《咏鹅》) <br class="br">Variant translation: <br class="br">Geese, geese, geese,<br>Curl necks and sing.<br>White feathers floating on the green,<br>They swim with red webbed feet. <br class="br">"On Geese", as translated by YeShell in How To Write Classical Chinese Poems (Lulu Press, 2015)
