To its own impulse every creature stirs; / Live by — Matthew Arnold

Spare me the whispering, crowded loom, / The friends who come and gape and go, / The ceremonious air of gloom— / All, which makes death a hideous show. 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. 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 concer… Read more → Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life. Essays in Criticism Second Series (1888) ‘Wordsworth’

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. Platão Virtue is insufficient temptation. George Bernard Shaw Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot. Charles Chaplin Never trust a husband too far, nor a bachelor too near. Helen Rowland