“You are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine”
Source: Put on Your Crown: Life-Changing Moments on the Path to Queendom
Source: Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), p. 52
The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)
“Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and”
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: But why then did the Ancient Priestesses always answer in Verse?... To this Plutarch replies... That even the Ancient Priestesses did now and then speak in Prose. And besides this, in Old times all People were born Poets.... [T]hey had no sooner drank a little freely, but they made Verses; they had no sooner cast their eyes on a Handsom Woman, but they were all Poesy, and their very common discourse fell naturally into Feet and Rhime: So that their Feasts and their Courtships were the most delectable things in the World. But now this Poetick Genius has deserted Mankind: and tho' our passions be as ardent... yet Love at present creeps in humble prose.... Plutarch gives us another reason... that the Ancients wrote always in Verse, whether they treated of Religion, Morality, Natural Philosophy or Astrology. Orpheus and Hesiod, whom every body acknowledges for Poets, were Philosophers also: and Parmenides, Xenophanes, Empedocles, Eudoxus, and Thales... [the] Philosophers, were Poets too. It is very strange indeed that Poetry should be elder Brother to Prose... but it is very probable... precepts... were shap'd into measured lines, that they might be the more easily remembred: and therefore all their Laws and their rules of Morality were in Verse. By this we may see that Poetry had a much more serious beginning than is usually imagin'd, and that the Muses have of late days mightily deviated from their original Gravity.<!--pp. 207-209
“There's more to life than books you know, but not much more”
from the song "Handsome Devil"
From songs
“The past is… much more uncertain—or even falsely reported—than is usually recognized.”
Preface
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)
“Even more so than when we are awake, we are ourselves when we are asleep. We play all the parts.”
"Más exclusivamente que en la vigilia, en el sueño somos nosotros. Contribuimos con todo el reparto."
Descanso de caminantes, 2001.
Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Context: Is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable probability for her conclusions? If we claim only reasonable probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”
