Poetry is creative expression; poetry is constructive expression. That, in a sentence, is the real distinction.... In poetry the w...ords are born or re-born in the act of thinking. The words are, in Bergsonian phraseology, a becoming; they develop in the mind pari passu with the development of the thought. There is no time interval between the words and the thought. The thought is the word and the word is the thought, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. "Constructive" implies ready-made materials; words stacked round the builder, ready for use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its "creative" function is confined to plan and elevation--functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares an...d works which have no direct bearing on it;Mis then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Well, we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says [in Le dernier jour d'un condamné]:... we have an interval, and then our place k...nows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasm, or the "enthusiasm of humanity" [in Auguste Comte's Le système de politique positive]. Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from ...the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts; whence we might start again with Orpheus, and the Trojan war, the Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome, continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to--MAmerica. It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own mother. A respectable tea-party merely,--whose gossip would be Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled Columbus,--the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,--the nineteenth was the Virgin Mary--the twenty-fourth was the Cumæan Sibyl,--the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her name,--the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,--the sixtieth was Eve, the mother of mankind. So much for the "Old woman that lives under the hill, And if she's not gone she lives there still." It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at the death of Time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I was interested to see how a pioneer lived on this side of the country. His life is in some respects more adventurous than that o...f his brother in the West; for he contends with winter as well as the wilderness, and there is a greater interval of time at least between him and the army which is to follow. Here immigration is a tide which may ebb when it has swept away the pines; there it is not a tide, but an inundation, and roads and other improvements come steadily rushing after.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you ...can fool all of the people all of the time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A good performance, like a human life, is a temporal affair--a process in time. It is good as a whole through being good in its pa...rts, and through their good order to one another. It cannot be called good as a whole until it is finished. During the process all we can say of it, if we speak precisely, is that it is becoming good. The same is true of a whole human life. Just as the whole performance never exists at any one time, but is a process of becoming, so a human life is also a performance in time and a process of becoming. And just as the goodness that attaches to the performance as a whole does not attach to any of its parts, so the goodness of a human life as a whole belongs to it alone, and not to any of its parts or phases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a time when only the dead smiled, happy in their peace.... ... Stars of Death stood over us, and innocent Russia squirmed under the bloody boots, under the wheels of black Marias.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem... From insignificance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »