5 Quotes & Sayings By John Richard Stephens

In 17th-century Oxford, a young man named John Richard Stephens was born, of a family that was not poor but had no fortune either. This lack of material wealth left no margin for the exercise of his unusual gifts of wit, learning and invention. His father was a small-town doctor and his mother a schoolmistress. He was sent to school at Winchester College and then, after a brief period at the University of Glasgow, to Balliol College, Oxford Read more

But it was not until he was nineteen years old that he became a doctor himself. It is said that his mother once observed him as he sat with his feet on the table writing out some difficult calculation upon a slate as though it were as easy as adding up sums of money. He had been taught from childhood how to work hard by those who knew him best—his parents, his sister and his tutor Leonard Osborn.

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No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. -MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu. . John Richard Stephens
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Traditional Saying (Hawaiian): Only when the water gourd isn't full do you hear it gurgling. (Those who are ignorant have an awful lot to say.) John Richard Stephens
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Hawai'i is the only place in the fifty states where you can see the stars of the entire northern and southern hemispheres. Here, stars that can't be seen from the mainland are visible, along with stars that aren't visible from Australia. John Richard Stephens
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Macadamia nuts can be fatal to dogs, sometimes causing seizures and kidney failure. John Richard Stephens