Earliest Recorded Usage

Famous quotes containing the words earliest, recorded and/or usage:

    At the earliest ending of winter,
    In March, a scrawny cry from outside
    Seemed like a sound in his mind.
    He knew that he heard it,
    A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
    In the early March wind.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned.
    14th-century French proverb, first recorded in English in A. Barclay, Gringore’s Castle of Labour (1506)

    I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.
    —A.J. (Alfred Jules)