“What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?”

— Thomas Gray

St. 4
On the Death of a Favourite Cat http://www.thomasgray.org/cgi-bin/display.cgi?text=odfc (1747)

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

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?" by Thomas Gray?

Thomas Gray photo

Thomas Gray 81

English poet, historian 1716–1771

Related quotes

“Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

A Foreword to Krazy (1946)
Context: A humbly poetic, gently clownlike, supremely innocent, and illimitably affectionate creature (slightly resembling a child's drawing of a cat, but gifted with the secret grace and obvious clumsiness of a penguin on terra firma) who is never so happy as when egoist-mouse, thwarting altruist-dog, hits her in the head with a brick. Dog hates mouse and worships "cat", mouse despises "cat" and hates dog, "cat" hates no one and loves mouse.

“If gold rusts, what then can iron do?”

Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales

Source: The Canterbury Tales

“To what extremes won't you compel our hearts,
you accursed lust for gold?”
Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames?

Virgil Aeneid

Source: Aeneid (29–19 BC), Book III, Lines 56–57 (tr. Robert Fagles); the murder of Polydorus.

“The cat would eate fish, and would not wet her feete.”

John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs

Part I, chapter 11.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Dogs and cats came from a common ancestor, can you explain that?… Can you explain it now, what animal you're talking about that dogs and cats came from… It was arboreal?… What do you mean by 'arboreal?”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

AronRa vs Ray Comfort (September 17th, 2012), Radio Paul's Radio Rants

“I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Why so scrawny, cat?
Starving for fat fish or mice…
Or backyard love?”

Bashō Matsuo (1644–1694) Japanese poet

Source: Japanese Haiku

“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”

Doris Lessing book Particularly Cats

Particularly Cats, ch. 2 (1967)

““Hello, Martin. What can I do for you?”
“Got a problem.”
“A big one?”
“Female human-sized.””

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 3, “The Spacelike Horizon” (p. 60)

“Time is what turns kittens into cats.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Source: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Related topics