WIST Quotations

Billings, Josh -- Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, 1871-06 (1871 ed.)

Dave — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 18:40:08 +0000

The man who wont beleave enny thing he kant see, aint so wize az a mule, for they will kick at a thing in the dark.

[The man who won’t believe anything he can’t see, ain’t so wise as a mule, for they will kick at a thing in the dark.]

Josh Billings (1818-1885) American humorist, aphorist [pseud. of Henry Wheeler Shaw]
Josh Billings’ Farmer’s Allminax, 1871-06 (1871 ed.)
(Source)

Wilcox, Ella Wheeler -- Poems of Passion, Epigraph (1883)

Dave — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 21:16:03 +0000

Oh, you who read some song that I have sung,
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung?
Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud
His secret thought unto the listening crowd?
Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore:
You have its shape, its color and no more.
It tells not one of those vast mysteries
That lie beneath the surface of the seas.
Our songs are shells, cast out by-waves of thought;
Here, take them at your pleasure; but think not
You’ve seen beneath the surface of the waves,
Where lie our shipwrecks and our coral caves.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author, poet, temperance advocate, spiritualist
Poems of Passion, Epigraph (1883)
(Source)

Butcher, Jim -- Changes (2010)

Dave — Tue, 30 Sep 2014 12:47:39 +0000

There’re things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times.

Jim Butcher (b. 1971) American author
Changes (2010)