Remember how often you have postponed minding your interest, and let slip those opportunities the gods have given you. It is now h...igh time to consider what sort of world you are part of, and from what kind of governor of it you are descended; that you have a set period assigned you to act in, and unless you improve it to brighten and compose your thoughts, it will quickly run off with you, and be lost beyond recovery.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the m...ost lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend ... for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings--woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general ... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing ...them a higher one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, waggery, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and ...knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the individuals who compose the purest circles of aristocracy in Europe, the guarded blood of centuries, should pass in review,... in such manner as that we could, at leisure, and critically inspect their behavior, we might find no gentleman, and no lady; for, although excellent specimens of courtesy and high-breeding would gratify us in the assemblage, in the particulars, we should detect offence. Because, elegance comes of no breeding, but of birth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music ...is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To understand The signs that stars compose, we need depend... Only on stars that are entirely there And the apparent space between them. There Never need be lines between them, puzzling Our sense of what is what.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The greatest blunders, like the thickest ropes, are often compounded of a multitude of strands. Take the rope apart, separate it i...nto the small threads that compose it, and you can break them one by one. You think, "That is all there was!" But twist them all together and you have something tremendous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Blake is very much like Beethoven in his artistic independence and universality. Like Beethoven, he is a pioneer Romantic of that ...heroic first generation which thought that the flames of the French Revolution would burn down all fetters. Like Beethoven, he asserts the creative freedom of the imagination within his work and makes a new world of thought out of it. There sounds all through Blake's poetry ... that lyric despair mingled with quickness to exaltation, that sense of a primal intelligence fighting the mind's limitations, that brings Beethoven's last quartets so close to absolute meditation and the Ninth Symphony to a succession of triumphal marches. What is nearest and first in both men is so strong a sense of their own identity that they are always reaching beyond man's conception of his powers. In both there is a positive assertion against suffering, an impa tience with forms and means. As Beethoven said of the violinist who complained of the difficulty of one of the Rasumofsky quartets--"Does he really suppose I think of his puling little fiddle when the spirit speaks to me and I compose something?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »