“That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.”
"Poetry is a Destructive Force"
Parts of a World (1942)
Context: That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own...The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.
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Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: What causes us the most misery and pain... has nothing to do with the sort of information made accessible by computers. The computer and its information cannot answer any of the fundamental questions we need to address to make our lives more meaningful and humane. The computer cannot provide an organizing moral framework. It cannot tell us what questions are worth asking. It cannot provide a means of understanding why we are here or why we fight each other or why decency eludes us so often, especially when we need it the most. The computer is... a magnificent toy that distracts us from facing what we most need to confront — spiritual emptiness, knowledge of ourselves, usable conceptions of the past and future.
“Of all the aspects of social misery nothing is so heartbreaking as unemployment …”
Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 10
Source: Fly on the Wall: How One Girl Saw Everything
“Love is a popular romantic notion that leads to nothing but its own brand of misery.”
Source: Jenna Starborn
Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.