Alice Meynell citations (13 citations)

Alice Meynell: 13 citations0 J'aime

Alice Meynell: Citations en anglais

“Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.”

"Introductory Note" to The Poetry of Pathos & Delight: From the Works of Coventry Patmore; Passages Selected by Alice Meynell (London: William Heinemann, 1906), p. xi.

“I came from nothing; but from where
Come these undying thoughts I bear?”

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Alice Meynell

Opening lines of Song of Derivations" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-song-of-derivations/"A. In Poems (London: John Lane, 1896) this poem is titled "The Modern Poet: A Song of Derivations". In later editions of Poems, it is titled "A Poet's Fancies VIII: A Song of Derivations".

“It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.”

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Alice Meynell

"The Colour of Life" in The Colour of Life and Other Essays on Things Seen and Heard (London: John Lane, 1896), p. 4.

“She walks—the lady of my delight—
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She keeps them from the steep”

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Alice Meynell

Opening stanza of "The Shepherdess" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-shepherdess/ in Later Poems (London: John Lane, 1902).

“The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe."”

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Alice Meynell

Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.</p>
"V. Fairies", pp. 32–33
Childhood (1913)

“The eyelids confess, and reject, and refuse to reject. They have expressed all things ever since man was man.And they express so much by seeming to hide or to reveal that which indeed expresses nothing. For there is no message from the eye. It has direction, it moves, in the service of the sense of sight; it receives the messages of the world. But expression is outward, and the eye has it not. There are no windows of the soul, there are only curtains.”

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Alice Meynell

"Eyes", pp. 98–99
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)

“The cloud controls the light.[...]It is the cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground shine.”

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Alice Meynell

"Cloud", pp. 16–17
The Colour of Life and Other Essays (1896)

“[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake."”

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Alice Meynell

He that saveth his art shall lose it.
Meynell alludes to the saying of Jesus: "He that saveth his life shall lose it" (Mark 8:35).
Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. X. "In Churches", p. 134

“The mothers of all ages are those who have suffered because others suffered; for each of them, self is less sensitive than the sense of her child. Self is not locked up in the maternal heart, there to be cherished, as it is by the egoist, or to be crushed and silenced, as it is by the Saint. In the mother, self is not lost, but loses all its evil by the passionate personal love that distributes it among sons and daughters. Perfect self-less love would perhaps be distributed through the multitude, but a mother is not perfect: nature has so much use for her—separate, family use—that she cannot let her go free from irrational, indispensable partialities and limitings, even injustices, all serving the turn of the race.”

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Alice Meynell

Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. IV. "The Mother", p. 40

“A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect."”

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Alice Meynell

Source: Mary, the Mother of Jesus: An Essay (1912), Ch. II. "Mary in the Scriptures", pp. 18, 21

“No mirror keeps its glances.”

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Alice Meynell

"Your Own Fair Youth", p. 15
Preludes (1875)