“The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”
Source: The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–82
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Charles Darwin161
British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by… 1809–1882Related quotes
“Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain
That has been, and may be again.”
William Wordsworth The Solitary Reaper
The Solitary Reaper.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist
"Imaginary Homelands (1992)
Source: Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
Context: It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"… human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death.
“The loss of wealth is loss of dirt,
As sages in all times assert;
The happy man's without a shirt.”
John Heywood (1497–1580) English writer known for plays, poems and a collection of proverbs
Be Merry Friends; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist
Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century
Christopher Callahan (October 2000), Music in Medieval Medical Practice: Speculations and Certainties https://symposium.music.org/index.php/40/item/2168-music-in-medieval-medical-practice-speculations-and-certainties#16 <br class="br">De Institutione Musica
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher
"The Vocation of the Scholar" (1794), as translated by William Smith, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1889), Vol. I, Lecture IV, p. 188.
The Vocation of the Scholar (1794)