“I kno plenty ov folks who are so kondem kontrary, that if they should fall into the river, they would insist uopon floating up stream.”
Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)
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Josh Billings 91
American humorist 1818–1885Related quotes

2000, Excerpts from an address to Fiji's Great Council of Chiefs, 28 July 2005

Source: Helen Craig McCullough's translations, Kokin Wakashū: The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry (1985), p. 206

“A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a mighty stream; and so with other things—a tree, a man—anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.”
Scilicet et fluvius qui visus maximus ei,
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.
Scilicet et fluvius qui visus maximus ei,
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.
Book VI, lines 674–677 (quoted in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, tr. W. C. Hazlitt)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

“Them folks who are sudden, aint apt tew be solid; lively streams are alwus shallow.”
Josh Billings: His Works, Complete (1873)

“She floats upon the river of his thoughts.”
The Spanish Student http://www.readbookonline.net/title/3208/, Act II, sc. iii (1843).

“Floating down a river named Emotion…will I make it back to shore, or drift into the unknown?”
Lyrics, Morning View (2001)