May quotes
9.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"As for organs, traits, etc., being "for" something, the notion may be a useful shorthand, but shouldn't be taken too seriously, if only because of the ubiquitous phenomenon of exaptation."
"After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover."
"We all are motivated by deep impulses and deep appetites to serve, even though we may not be able to locate that which we are hoping to serve. So this is just a part of my nature and I think everybody else's nature to offer oneself at the critical moment when the emergency becomes articulate. It's only then that we can locate that willingness to serve."
"You can say that I've grown bitter but of this you can be sure. The rich have get their channels in the bedrooms of the poor. And there's a mighty Judgement coming but I may be wrong."
"Science is the observation of things possible, whether present or past; prescience is the knowledge of things which may come to pass, though but slowly."
"Though I may not . . . be able to quote other authors, I shall rely on that which is much greater and more worthy - on experience."
"We may call painting the grandchild of nature."
"If we make mistakes in our first compositions and do not know them, we may not amend them."
"With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise, and knowledgeable "native speaker" of mathematical notation."
"Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods."
"History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough."
"Faint heart never won true friend. O my friend, may it come to pass, once, that when you are my friend I may be yours."
"A fact may blossom into a truth."
"Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it."
"Be as the sailor who keeps the polestar in his eye. By so doing we may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we will maintain a true course."
"Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government."
"You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied."
"A stranger may easily detect what is strange to the oldest inhabitant, for the strange is his province."
"I trust that some may be as near and dear to Buddha, or Christ, or Swedenborg, who are without the pale of their churches."
"A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom."
