Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings
Tales from the Flat Earth, Night's Master (1978)
Source: Book 3 “The World’s Lure”, Chapter 4 “The Anger of the Magicians” (p. 163)
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings
Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist
God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)
John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician
Space (1912)
Context: Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.
Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) Greek poet
One of Their Gods http://www.cavafy.com/poems/content.asp?id=40&cat=1 <br class="br">Collected Poems (1992) <br class="br">Context: The people going by would gaze at him,<br>and one would ask the other if he knew him,<br>if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.<br>But some who looked more carefully<br>would understand and step aside;<br>and as he disappeared under the arcades,<br>among the shadows and the evening lights,<br>going toward the quarter that lives<br>only at night, with orgies and debauchery,<br>with every kind of intoxication and desire,<br>they would wonder which of Them it could be,<br>and for what suspicious pleasure<br>he had come down into the streets of Selefkia<br>from the August Celestial Mansions.
Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna
Women Saints of East and West
“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.
Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher
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)