“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out. Vol. II, ch. 27.
Source: Vanity Fair (1847–1848)

Speech http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/index.html at Digital Biota 2 http://www.cyberbiology.org/, Cambridge, UK, (1998) <!-- also quoted in Richard Dawkins' eulogy http://www.edge.org/documents/adams_index.html for Douglas Adams -->
Context: Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, may have been made to have me in it!" This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say.

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

On Certainty (1969)

I clamored. In a frantic effort to arrive at some kind of order, some tentative working program, I would sit down quietly now and then and spend long, long hours mapping out a plan of procedure. Plans, such as architects and engineers sweat over, were never my forte. But I could always visualize my dreams in a cosmogonic pattern. Though I could never formulate a plot I could balance and weigh opposing forces, characters, situations, events, distribute them in a sort of heavenly lay-out, always with plenty of space between, always with the certitude that there is no end, only worlds within worlds ad infinitum, and that wherever one left off one had created a world, a world finite, total, complete.
The Rosy Crucifixion II : Plexus (1953)

Speech in Omaha, Nebraska (8 September 1919), as recorded in Addresses of President Wilson (1919), p. 75 and in "The Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Authorized Edition) War and Peace: Presidential Messages, Addresses, and Public Papers (1917-1924) Volume II Page 36; Wilson later used this phrase in his address in Pueblo, Colorado, in what has been called his League of Nations Address (25 September 1919)[Note: this phrase is not in Wilson's address in Pueblo, Colorado (25 September 1919). He made a much softer statement making the inevitability of a future war without the League implicit rather than explicit.]
1910s

Annie Besant, Forward
The Masters and the Path (1925)