"I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over."

—John Masefield, Sea-Fever

"The appeal of history to us all is in the last analysis poetic. But the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it. That which compels the historian to 'scorn delights and live laborious days' is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past. To peer into that magic mirror and see fresh figures there every day is a burning desire that consumes and satisfies him all his life, that carries him each morning, eager as a lover, to the library and the muniment room. It haunts him like a passion of almost terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them."

—G.M. Trevelyan, quoted in Men and Centuries by J.H. Plumb

"Il n’est qu’une erreur et qu’un crime: vouloir enfermer la diversité du monde dans des doctrines et des systèmes. C’est une erreur que de détourner d’autres hommes de leur libre jugement, de leur volonté propre, et de leur imposer quelque chose qui n’est pas en eux. Seuls agissent ainsi ceux qui ne respectent pas la liberté, et Montaigne n’a rien haï autant que la “frénésie”, le délire furieux des dictateurs de l’esprit qui veulent avec arrogance et vanité imposer au monde leurs “nouveautés” comme la seule et indiscutable vérité, et pour qui le sang de centaines de milliers d’hommes n’est rien, pourvu que leur cause triomphe."

—Stefan Zweig, Montaigne

"There is only one error and one crime: to try and shut up the diversity of the world within doctrines and systems..."

"A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

—Jorge Luis Borges, The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley

"[It was] told of the elephants by a king of their country, Juba, that when by the craft of their hunters one of them finds himself caught in certain deep pits that they prepare for them and cover with brush to fool them, his comrades arrive posthaste with many stones and logs to help him get out. But this animal in so many other actions approaches human capacity that if I wanted to trace in detail what experience has taught us about him, I should easily win the argument that I ordinarily maintain, that there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man."

—Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebon (1575-1576, 1578-1580), trans. Donald M. Frame

"She had lived with long-haired men and short-haired women, she had contributed a flexible faith and an irremediable want of funds to a dozen social experiments, she had partaken of the comfort of a hundred religions, had followed innumberable dietary reforms, chiefly of the negative order, and had gone of an evening to a séance or a lecture as regularly as she had eaten her supper."

—Henry James, The Bostonians (1886)

"At twenty-something he went off to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself to the habit of feigning that he was somebody, so that his 'nobodiness' might not be discovered. In London he found the calling he had been predestined to: he became an actor, that person who stands upon a stage and plays at being another person, for an audience of people who play at taking him for that person. The work of a thespian held out a remarkable happiness to him—the first, perhaps, he had ever known; but when the last line was delivered and the last dead man applauded off the stage, the hated taste of unreality would assail him. He would cease being Ferrex or Tamerlane and return to being nobody. Haunted, hounded, he began imaging other heroes, other tragic fables. Thus while his body, in whorehouses and taverns around London, lived its life as body, the soul that lived inside it would be Caeser, who ignores the admonition of the Sybil, and Juliet, who hates the lark, and Macbeth, who speaks on the moor with the witches who are also the Fates, the Three Weird Sisters."

—Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing from The Maker (1960), trans. Andrew Hurley