“And when you stick on conversation’s burrs,
Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician
A rhymed Lesson. Urania; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.”
The Figure a Poem Makes (1939)
Context: Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.
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Robert Frost265
American poet 1874–1963Related quotes
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