“Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.”

— David Hume, book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 7
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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David Hume138

Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian 1711–1776

Bhartrihari (570) Indian linguist, poet and writer

Vairagyaśatakam 38 https://archive.org/stream/Vairagya.Satakam.of.Bhartrihari#page/n28/mode/1up <br class="br">Śatakatraya

“The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.”

Tim Powers On Stranger Tides

Source: On Stranger Tides (1987), Chapter 1 (p. 9, repeated on p. 53)

“I imagined in everybody I passed there was some story that they carried with them that would break your heart. So how could you have the temerity to approach that person and say, here's what's wrong with you?”

Barry Lopez (1945) American writer

On learning empathy after a cancer diagnosis in “Writer Barry Lopez Reflects On A Life Traveling Beyond The 'Horizon'” https://www.npr.org/2019/03/27/707358144/barry-lopez-shares-6-places-that-shaped-his-world-understanding-in-horizon in NPR (2019 Mar 27)

“It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 11, Section IV, p. 130

“Without his mate to share his life, he was but a screen for events and circumstances to pass through. He was npt even empty, for he was no vessel to hold even the thinnest of air.
He lived, though was not truly alive”

Jessica Bird book Lover Revealed

Source: Lover Revealed

“Loupgarou was come with all his giants, who, seeing Pantagruel in a manner alone, was carried away with temerity and presumption, for hopes that he had to kill the good man.”

Francois Rabelais book Gargantua and Pantagruel

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Pantagruel (1532), Chapter 29.
Context: Loupgarou was come with all his giants, who, seeing Pantagruel in a manner alone, was carried away with temerity and presumption, for hopes that he had to kill the good man. Whereupon he said to his companions the giants, You wenchers of the low country, by Mahoom, if any of you undertake to fight against these men here, I will put you cruelly to death. It is my will, that you let me fight single. In the meantime you shall have good sport to look upon us.

“The water in a vessel is sparkling; the water in the sea is dark. The small truth has words that are clear; the great truth has great silence.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

176
Stray Birds (1916)

“Going back years, I am absolutely certain that I have taken far more extreme positions on people who deny the Holocaust than you have…Even to enter into the arena of debate on whether the Nazis carried out such atrocities is already to lose one's humanity.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992

“Sounis had been thinking of Ambiades. "He would have been a better man under different circumstances."
Gen looked at him. "True enough," he said. "But does a good man let his circumstances determine his character?”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book I, Ch. 1: The Eve of the War
The War of the Worlds (1898)
Context: No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same... Yet, across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

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