Does anyone know where this phrase comes from: "[Possessive pronoun] wants are simple, [possessive pronoun] needs are few"? (Or "were": one place it turns up is in obituaries.)
I first encountered it in a 1970 song ("Oscurita") written and performed by a pop trio, Cashman, Pistilli and West. (My references indicate that Al Martino covered the song.) But it goes back a lot further, very possibly to the 19th century.
Conventional search engines (Google, Yahoo, PCH) haven't helped me. The Internet Archive gets me back to 1904, in a magazine called Forest and Stream. (There are earlier listings shown there, but the dates are erroneous, except for an 1880 book called "India in 1880" -- which also shows up in Google Search -- where the two phrases seem to be used as part of ordinary sentences.)
It seems to me like something Henry David Thoreau might have written, but it's not in a list of his quotes online. More generally, it's not in my copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, or a similar online collection.
Can anyone help?
Eric
It Sounds Like
. . .something a eighteen-year-old character might say in a black and white oater while looking over a 160 acres of homestead and future. His stake would be prime land with good water that he and Uncle Sam had "rescued" from the indigenous savages.
Just to show that Karma is a bitch, forty years later that that same person might say, "Who knew this place was a desert?" as he loaded up his rusted-out truck with all his wants and headed to California to see about his needs.
Jill
Angela Rasch (Jill M I)
Duckduckgo
Duckduckgo references Don Quixote, circa 1605,1615
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Thanks...
It's not coming up for me there. Could you give me the URL? I'm not finding the phrase in the translations on Project Gutenberg.
Thanks, Eric