Oh, swiftly glides the bonnie boat,
Just parted from the shore,
And to the fisher's chorus-note,
Soft moves the dipping oar!
--
Joanna Baillie, Song, Oh, Swiftly glides the Bonnie Boat; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 74.Joanna Baillie
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To a man standing on the shore, time passes quicker than to a man on a boat — especially if the man on the boat is with his wife.
Woody Allen
When one exchanged the rowing-seat for a place in the bottom of the boat, he suffered a bodily depression that caused him to be careless of everything save an obligation to wiggle one finger. There was cold sea-water swashing to and fro in the boat, and he lay in it. His head, pillowed on a thwart, was within an inch of the swirl of a wave crest, and sometimes a particularly obstreperous sea came in-board and drenched him once more. But these matters did not annoy him. It is almost certain that if the boat had capsized he would have tumbled comfortably out upon the ocean as if he felt sure it was a great soft mattress.
Stephen Crane
Most men judge only by their senses and let themselves be persuaded by what they see. Just as the man whose boat sails from shore to shore thinks he is stationary and that the shore moves, men turn with the earth under the sky and have believed that the sky was turning above them. On top of that, insufferable vanity has convinced humans that nature has been made only for them, as though the sun, a huge body four hundred and thirty-four times as large as the earth, had been lit only to ripen our crab apples and cabbages.
I am not one to give in to the insolence of those brutes. I think the planets are worlds revolving around the sun and that the fixed stars are also suns that have planets revolving around them. We can't see those worlds from here because they are so small and because the light they reflect cannot reach us. How can one honestly think that such spacious globes are only large, deserted fields? And that our world was made to lord it over all of them just because a dozen or so vain wretches like us happen to be crawling around on it? Do people really think that because the sun gives us light every day and year, it was made only to keep us from bumping into walls? No, no, this visible god gives light to man by accident, as a king's torch accidentally shines upon a working man or burglar passing in the street."Cyrano de Bergerac
I exist. It is soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.
Jean-Paul Sartre
The voice so sweet, the words so fair,
As some soft chime had stroked the air;
And, though the sound were parted thence,
Still left an echo in the sense.Ben Jonson
Baillie, Joanna
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