“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” — Letter from Sir Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke
Milton
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” — Milton, AREOPAGITICA
Milton
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” — Milton, PARADISE LOST
Shakespeare
“And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” – Theseus in Shakespeare, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM V.i.12
Sappho
“To have beauty is to have only that, but to have goodness is to be beautiful too.” – Sappho
Mary Wortley Montagu
“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” – Mary Wortley Montagu, LETTERS
Montaigne
“There is no wish more natural than the wish to know.” – Montaigne, ESSAYS
Juvenal
“Wisdom is the conqueror of fortune.” – Juvenal, SATIRES, XIII. 20.
Mandeville
“The excellence of things is in the middle.” – Mandeville on Aristotle in THE TRAVELS OF SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE
Homer
“It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise.” – Homer, THE ILIAD