Les vrais philosophes sont comme les e¤  le¤  phants, qui en marchant ne posent jamais le second pied a'   terre que le premier ne soit bien affermi. True philosophers are like elephants, who when walking never placetheir second footontheground untilthefirst is steady.

-Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de
  Entretiens sur la pluralite¤   des mondes, Sixie'  me soir.

Hail our Great Queen in her regalia; One foot in Canada, the other in Australia.

-Gay,James
Attributed to Gay by William  Arthur Deacon in TheFour Jameses (1927).

I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

-Grossmith, George
  The Diary of a Nobody (with Weedon Grossmith), ch.7.

For here I leave my second leg, And the Forty-second Foot!

-Honorius of Autun
  'Faithless Nelly Gray'.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out like shining from shook foil† Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wearsman'ssmudgeand sharesman'ssmell: thesoil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'God's Grandeur'.

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot.

-Hughes,Ted (Edward James)
  'Hawk Roosting'.

An' I seed her first a-smokin'of a whackin' white cheroot, An'a-wastin'Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot.

-Kipling, (Joseph) Rudyard
  'Mandalay'.

No government isgoing to take from me my right to speak, my right to protest against wrong, my right to do everything that is for the benefit of mankind.I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.

-Maclean,John
  Speech at his trial at the High Court, Edinburgh, 9 May, quoted in Nan Milton John Maclean (1973), ch.3.

He took the golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store, to circumscribe This universe, and all created things: One foot he centred, and the other turned Round through the vast profundity obscure, And said,'Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds This be thy just circumference,O world.'

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.7, l.225^31.

He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a pedlar just opening his pack.

-Moore, Clement
  The Night Before Christmas.

One foot in Eden still, I stand And look across the other land. The world's great day isgrowing late, Yet strange these fields that we have planted So long with crops of love and hate.

-Muir, Edwin
  One Foot in Eden,'One Foot in Eden'.

We all three got up on our elephant which brought us hither. For my own part I found [it] very uneasy riding, being badly seated and not accustomed (he had such a shuffling, jogging justling pace), sitting hindermost on the ridge of his monstrous massy chine bones, and nothing at all under me (nor they neither) that I wished myselfonfoot and would havelet myselffall off butthat it was somewhat too high. In fine, we alighted off from his back into the upper galleries of the house and saved the labour going upstairs.

-Mundy, Peter
c.1620  On riding on an elephant. Travels (pubished c.1650).

Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone, A Page, a Grave, that they can call their own; But spread, my sons, your glory thin or thick, On passive paper, or on solid brick.

-Pope, Alexander
  The Dunciad, bk.4, l.127^30.

Speak out, sir, and do not Maister or Campbell meömy foot is on my native heath, and my name is MacGregor!

-Scott, Sir Walter
  Rob Roy to Francis Osbaldistone. Rob Roy, ch.34.

That damnable woman's trick of heaping obligations on a man, of placing yourself so entirelyand helplesslyat his mercy that at last he dare not take a step without running to you for leave. I know a poor wretch whose one desire in life is to run away from his wife. She prevents him by threatening to throw herself in front of the engine of the train he leaves her in. That is what all women do. If we try to go where you do not want us to go there is no law to prevent us; but when we take the first step your breasts are under our foot as it descends: your bodies are under our wheels as we start. No woman shall ever enslave me in that way.

-Shaw, George Bernard
  JohnTanner to AnnWhitefield. Man and Superman, act1.

   A land may be said to be discovered the first time a European, presumably an Englishman, sets foot on it.

-Stefansson,Vilhjalmur
Discovery (published1964).

The gauger walked with willing foot, And aye the gauger played the flute; And what should Master Gauger play But Over the hills and far away?

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
  'A Song of the Road', stanza1 (dated'Forest of Montargis, 1878'), collected in Underwoods (1887), bk.1, no.2.

The Shadow cloaked from head to foot, Who keeps the keys of all the creeds.

-Tennyson
  In Memoriam A.H.H., canto 23, l.4^5.

Gorgonised me from head to foot With a stony British stare.

-Tennyson
  Maud, pt.1, sect.13, stanza 2, l.464^5.

Out of the debris of a statue thoroughly shattered a new art work is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the foot race; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it.

-Crayencour
Quoted in the NewYorkTimes,10 May1992.