Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
http://books.google.com/books?id=lFXyZLM1XxYC&pg=PT412&dq=%22Just+as+eating+against+one%E2%80%99s+will+is+injurious+to+health%22&hl=en&ei=GFRbTIjiGoL-8AbytdC4Ag&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22Just%20as%20eating%20against%20one%E2%80%99s%20will%20is%20injurious%20to%20health%22&f=false
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
“Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing.”
Eric Rücker Eddison book The Worm Ouroboros
Source: The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Ch. 28 : Zora Rach Nam Psarrion, p. 427
Context: Thou art nothing. And all thy desires and memories and loves and dreams, nothing. The little dead earth-louse were of greater avail than thou, were it not nothing as thou art nothing. For all is nothing: earth and sky and sea and they that dwell therein. Nor shall this illusion comfort thee, if it might, that when thou art abolished these things shall endure for a season, stars and months return, and men grow old and die, and new men and women live and love and die and be forgotten. For what is it to thee, that shalt be as a blown-out flame? and all things in earth and heaven, and things past and things for to come, and life and death, and the mere elements of space and time, of being and not being, all shall be nothing unto thee; because thou shalt be nothing, for ever.
“In plucking the fruit of memory one runs the risk of spoiling its bloom.”
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer
The Arrow of Gold http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/argld10h.htm (1919), Author's note,
“Why does the brain retain the memory of the hurt from yesterday?”
Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher
5th Public Discussion, Saanen, Switzerland (8 August 1971)
1970s
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.”
Ann Brashares book Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
Source: Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood
“Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.”
Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
“In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician
“Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humor in the woman”
Oscar Wilde A Woman of No Importance
Source: A Woman of No Importance
