Famous quotes containing the words henry, viii, england, kings and/or matter:
“Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalm VIII (l. VIII, 3–4)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“As kings are begotten and born like other men, it is to be presumed that they are of the human species; and perhaps, had they the same education, they might prove like other men. But, flattered from their cradles, their hearts are corrupted, and their heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species by themselves.... Flattery cannot be too strong for them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old drinkers, they require dreams.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“If the axe is not sharp, it doesn’t matter how hard the wood is.”
—Chinese proverb.