Mistress

Famous quotes containing the word mistress:

    Marriage. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.
    Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)

    See the kind seed-receiving earth
    To every grain affords a birth:
    On her no showers unwelcome fall,
    Her willing womb retains ‘em all,
    And shall my Caelia be confined?
    No, live up to thy mighty mind,
    And be the mistress of Mankind!
    John Wilmot, 2d Earl Of Rochester (1647–1680)

    But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.”
    Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)