Famous quotes containing the words wise and/or mother:
“After the earthquake, which had destroyed three-quarters of Lisbon, the country’s wise men had found no more efficacious means of preventing total ruin than to give the people a fine auto-da-fé.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)