Quotes to inspire and reflect

In the prison of his days

Earth, receive an honored guest:

By mourning tongues

When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse.

Ironic points of light

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

What mad Nijinsky wrote

I sit in one of the dives

Like love we don’t know where or why

One rational voice is dumb: over a grave

An important Jew who died in exile.

The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,

This above all, to refuse to be a victim.

I turn my gaze

As I sit looking out of a window of the building

There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

The difference between genuine poetry and the poetry of Dryden, Pope, and all their school, is briefly this: their poetry is conceived and composed in their wits, genuine poetry is conceived and composed in the soul.

That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection .

Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

This something is style , and the Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure.

The power of the Latin classic is in character , that of the Greek is in beauty . Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly.

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Philistine must have originally meant, in the mind of those who invented the nickname, a strong, dogged, unenlightened opponent of the chosen people, of the children of the light.

Philistinism!—We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

I am bound by my own definition of criticism: a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world .

The notion of the free play of the mind upon all subjects being a pleasure in itself, being an object of desire, being an essential provider of elements without which a nation’s spirit, whatever compensations it may have for them, must, in the long run, die of inanition, hardly enters into an Englishman’s thoughts.

[Edmund] Burke is so great because, almost alone in England, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought.

He [the translator] will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.

The grand style arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject .

Nations are not truly great solely because the individuals composing them are numerous, free, and active; but they are great when these numbers, this freedom, and this activity are employed in the service of an ideal higher than that of an ordinary man, taken by himself.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us.

Who ordered, that their longing’s fire

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

That man is more of a political animal than bees or any other gregarious animals is evident. Nature, as we often say, makes nothing in vain, and man is the only animal who has the gift of speech.

We . . . make war that we may live in peace. Nicomachean Ethics bk. 10, 1177b

A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language with pleasurable accessories, each kind brought in separately in the parts of the work; in a dramatic, not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

Oftentimes have we reflected on a similar abuse

The whole is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the totality is something besides the parts.

[ The cry of the frogs :] Brekekekex, koax, koax.

You Birds have a great deal to gain from a kindlier Olympos. . . . A perpetual run, say, of halcyon days.