What is mistress?

Famous quotes containing the word mistress:

“God bless the master of this house,
Likewise the mistress too:”
—Unknown. God Bless the Master of This House (l. 1–2)

“Trying to avoid
Ideas, as in this poem? But we
Go back to them as to a wife, leaving
The mistress we desire?”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)

“But the nature of our civilized minds is so detached from the senses, even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our languages abound in, and so refined by the art of writing, and as it were spiritualized by the use of numbers, because even the vulgar know how to count and reckon, that it is naturally beyond our power to form the vast image of this mistress called “Sympathetic Nature.””
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)