Islands quotes
917 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside islands — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"They can't hurt me. Sure, they can crush you and kill you. They can lay you out on 42nd and Broadway and put hoses on you and flush you in the sewers and put you on the subway and carry you out to Coney island and bury you on the Ferris wheel. But I refuse to sit here and worry about dying."
"Each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own."
"Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island."
"'Rapa Nui' is about the conflict in the 1600s on Easter Island. It's about the clash of the royal clan and the working class."
"No man is an island unto himself."
"Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for everyone."
"The sight of the first woman in the minimal two-piece was as explosive as the detonation of the atomic bomb by the U.S. at Bikini Island in the Marshall Isles, hence the naming of the bikini."
"She tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them. Isolated on a green island, hedged about with snowdrops, laid with a counterpane of puckered silk, the innocent island floated under her window. Only George lagged behind."
"I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce."
"The three most celebrated doctors on the island have been to see me. One sniffed at what I spat, the second tapped where I spat from, and the third sounded me and listened as I spat. The first said I was dead, the second that I was dying and the third that I'm going to die."
"Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji."
"But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing."
"As known unknowns become known; unknown unknowns proliferate; the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."
"I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private beach with my own jetties and boats."
"Not to leave planet Earth would be like castaways on a desert island not trying to escape...Sending humans to other planets ... will shape the future of the human race in ways we don't yet understand, and may determine whether we have any future at all."
"Burn the boats as you enter the island and you will take the island."
"Transcendental Meditation gives me an island of calm in the midst of so much turbulence."
"Living in a society, instead of on a desert island, does not relieve a man of the responsibility of supporting his own life."
"In the Fiji islands, it appears, cannibalism is now familiar. They eat thier own wives and children. We only devour widows' houses, and great merchants outwit and absorb the substance of small ones, and every man feeds on his neighbor's labor if he can. It is a milder form of cannibalism."
"All our science and philosophy form only an island of knowledge surrounded by an ocean of mystery. The larger the island grows, the longer the shoreline where the known meets the unknown."
