
Source: The Analects, Chapter VI
Compendium Studii Theologiae (1292) c. viii. & Brewer's Bacon http://books.google.com/books?id=xugSScQC_bEC (1859) p. 466 as cited by George Gresley Perry, The Life and Times of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1871)
Context: Oh how delightful is the taste of wisdom to those who are thus steeped in it from its very fount and origin. They who have not tried this cannot feel the delight of wisdom, just as a sick man cannot estimate the flavour of food. But because they are affected with this sort of mental sickness, and their intellect in this matter is as it were deaf from their very birth, so as not to appreciate the delight of harmony, on this account they grieve not at this so great loss of wisdom, though indeed without doubt it is an infinite loss.
Source: The Analects, Chapter VI
Summations, Chapter 44
Source: Revelations of Divine Love
Context: Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
Context: Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
In which marvelling he seeth his God, his Lord, his Maker so high, so great, and so good, in comparison with him that is made, that scarcely the creature seemeth ought to the self. But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God endlessly keepeth him.
“It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.”
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Variant: A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
Context: It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same for love.
“Philosophy … bears witness to the deepest love of reflection, to absolute delight in wisdom.”
“Logological Fragments,” Philosophical Writings, M. Stolijar, trans. (Albany: 1997) #12
“Those who experiment and experience a lot in life have little taste in things.”
“Books should to one of these four ends conduce,
For wisdom, piety, delight, or use.”
Of Prudence (1668), line 83.
“On every thorn, delightful wisdom grows, In every rill a sweet instruction flows.”