Famous quotes containing the words closed, long and/or ray:
“My old Father used to have a saying that “If you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter”; and it occurs to me, that if the bargain you have just closed [marriage] can possibly be called a bad one, it is certainly the most pleasant one for applying that maxim to, which my fancy can, by any effort, picture.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Look not too long in the face of the fire, O man! Never dream with thy hand on the helm! Turn not they back to the compass; accept the first hint of the hitching tiller; believe not the artificial fire, when its redness makes all things look ghastly.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)