Poetry, it is often said and loudly so, is life's true mirror. But a monkey looking into a work of literature looks in vain for So...crates.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She is such a good friend that she would throw all her acquaintances into the water for the pleasure of fishing them out again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a ...prince as soon as his groom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't care very much for literary shrines and haunts ... I knew a woman in London who boasted that she had lodgings from the win...dows of which she could throw a stone into Carlyle's yard. And when I said, "Why throw a stone into Carlyle's yard?" she looked at me as if I were an imbecile and changed the subject.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn't make any sense if quoted as it stands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts: it has flowed forward. Rome is a ...continuity, called "eternal." What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For a symbol is like a rock dropped into a pool: it sends out ripples in all directions, and the ripples are in motion. Who can sa...y where the last ripple disappears? One may have a sense that he at least knows approximately the center point of all those ripples, the point at which the stone struck the water. Yet even then he has trouble marking it precisely. How does one make a mark on water? ... The ripples continue to move and the light to change on the water and the longer one watches the more changes he sees. And such shifting-and-being-at-the-same-instant is of the very sparkle and life of poetry. Of poetry and of life itself. For the poem is a dynamic and living thing. One experiences it as one experiences life--as everybody but Mr. Gradgrind experiences life. One is never done with it: every time he looks he sees something new, and it changes even as he watches. And that very sense of continuity in fluidity is one of the kinds of knowledge, one of the ways of knowing, that only the arts can teach, poetry foremost among them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To-day ... when material prosperity and well earned ease and luxury are assured facts from a national standpoint, woman's work and... woman's influence are needed as never before; needed to bring a heart power into this money getting, dollar-worshipping civilization; needed to bring a moral force into the utilitarian motives and interests of the time; needed to stand for God and Home and Native Land versus gain and greed and grasping selfishness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many of us carry memories of an influential teacher who may scarcely know we existed, yet who said something at just the right tim...e in our lives to snap a whole world into focus.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Por...tland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »