(144 quotes found)
“FAIRY, n. A creature, variously fashioned and endowed, that formerly inhabited the meadows and forests. It was nocturnal in its habits, and somewhat addicted to dancing and the theft of children. The fairies are now believed by naturalist to be extinct, though a clergyman of the Church of England saw three near Colchester as lately as 1855, while passing through a park after dining with the lord of the manor. The sight greatly staggered him, and he was so affected that his account of it was incoherent. In the year 1807 a troop of fairies visited a wood near Aix and carried off the daughter of a peasant, who had been seen to enter it with a bundle of clothing. The son of a wealthy _bourgeois_ disappeared about the same time, but afterward returned. He had seen the abduction been in pursuit of the fairies. Justinian Gaux, a writer of the fourteenth century, avers that so great is the fairies' power of transformation that he saw one change itself into two opposing armies and fight a battle with great slaughter, and that the next day, after it had resumed its original shape and gone away, there were seven hundred bodies of the slain which the villagers had to bury. He does not say if any of the wounded recovered. In the time of Henry III, of England, a law was made which prescribed the death penalty for "Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge" a fairy, and it was universally respected.”
Ambrose Bierce
“Men are creatures with two legs and eight hands.”
Jayne Mansfield
“On Angelina Jolie: 'She's like a wild stallion, she's like a non-earthly creature to me.”
Rosie O'Donnell
“Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word”
Mark Twain
“We are like water creatures looking up at the land and air and wondering how we can survive in that alien medium. The water we live in is Time. That alien medium we glimpse beyond time is Space. And that is where we are going.”
William S. Burroughs
“It's impressive how such a tiny creature in sheer numbers can drive you insane.”
Jason Hill
“Upon the creatures we have made, we are, ourselves, at last, dependent.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! -- incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”
“Human beings are the only creatures who are able to behave irrationally in the name of reason.”
Ashley Montagu
“Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
