
The Rhodora http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/rhodora.htm
1840s, Poems (1847)
The Rhodora
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
The Rhodora http://www.emersoncentral.com/poems/rhodora.htm
1840s, Poems (1847)
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Context: It was to little purpose to excuse the matter, by saying, that the badness of the Verses was a kind of Testimony that they were made by a God, who nobly scorn'd to be tyed up to rules and to be confined to the Beauty of a Style. For this made no impression upon the Philosophers; who, to turn this answer into ridicule, compared it to the Story of a Painter, who being hired to draw the Picture of a Horse tumbling on his Back upon the ground, drew one running full speed: and when he was told, that this was not such a Picture as was bespoke, he turned it upside down, and then ask'd if the Horse did not tumble upon his back now. Thus these Philosophers jeered such Persons, who by a way of arguing that would serve both ways, could equally prove that the Verses were made by a God, whether they were good or bad.<!--pp. 219-220
“The clearsighted eye turns the light back
to see its own Original Nature…”
Source: Echoes from the Bottomless Well (1985), p. 38
“Eye contact made people think you were being truthful even if you weren't.”
Source: All These Things I've Done
"The Unknown God" (1913) http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/350.html
Context: Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came. The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), I Philosophy