To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
—George Eliot, c. 1872
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Quotes
A good dog, sir, deserves a good bone.
—Ben Jonson, 1633Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.
—Virginia Woolf, 1899He that would eat the nut must crack the shell.
—Plautus, c. 200 BCPolitics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
—Paul Valéry, 1943Good men must not obey the laws too well.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1844Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.
—D.H. Lawrence, 1908Secrecy lies at the very core of power.
—Elias Canetti, 1960It hurts to watch the fluency of a body acclimated to its shackling.
—Leslie Jamison, 2014Man punishes the action, but God the intention.
—Thomas Fuller, 1732It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925Good or ill fortune is very little at our disposal.
—David Hume, 1742Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.
—W. Somerset Maugham, 1896