Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night II, Line 90.
“The strongest will, never fully does what it wants. It does what the circumstances allow.”
Book Sometimes you win Sometimes you Learn
dies slowly…
Muere lentamente quien no viaja, quien no lee,
quien no oye música,
quien no encuentra gracia en sí mismo.
Muere lentamente
quien destruye su amor propio,
quien no se deja ayudar...
Poem "Muere lentamente" (Dying Slowly), wrongly attributed to Pablo Neruda. See "Fake Pablo Neruda Poem Spreads on Internet" http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=325275&CategoryId=14094 by Ana Mendoza, Latin American Herald Tribune (12 January 2009).
Misattributed
Source: Selected Poems
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)
The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)
"Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)" http://www.aol.bartleby.com/229/4011.html (1839); later delivered as a lecture at the Brooklyn Art Union (31 March 1851) and printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertizer (3 April 1851)
Context: It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess. Who would not mourn that an ample palace, of surpassingly graceful architecture, fill’d with luxuries, and embellish’d with fine pictures and sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant, and never be known or enjoy’d by its owner? Would such a fact as this cause your sadness? Then be sad. For there is a palace, to which the courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a frivolous patch, and, though it is always waiting for them, not one of its owners ever enters there with any genuine sense of its grandeur and glory.
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
He that knows not what the world is, knows not where he is himself. He that knows not for what he was made, knows not what he is nor what the world is.
VIII, 52
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VIII
Dimensions of History, Chapter: The judgment of History, p. 77
History, What History Tells Us, Dimensions of History
