La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.
As translated by Samuel Beckett, in Samuel Beckett: Collected Poems 161-163.
La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.
Source: The Philosopher's Apprentice (2008), Chapter 11 (p. 245)
Emblems of Love (1912)
Context: And where is now that palace gone,
All the magical skill'd stone,
All the dreaming towers wrought
By Love as if no more than thought
The unresisting marble was?
How could such a wonder pass?
Ah, it was but built in vain
Against the stupid horns of Rome,
That pusht down into the common loam
The loveliness that shone in Spain.
But we have raised it up again!
A loftier palace, fairer far,
Is ours, and one that fears no war.
Safe in marvellous walls we are;
Wondering sense like builded fires,
High amazement of desires,
Delight and certainty of love,
Closing around, roofing above
Our unapproacht and perfect hour
Within the splendours of love's power.
Alas! What Boots the Long Laborious Quest?, l. 11 (1809).
“But evil is wrought by want of thought,
As well as want of heart.”
The Lady's Dream http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk/eop_hood_poetical_works_7.htm#246, st. 16 (1827).
1820s
The Paris Review interview
Context: The idea occurred to me that art was perhaps this—the psychological component of the autoimmune system. It works on the artist as a healing. But it works on others too, as a medicine. Hence our great, insatiable thirst for it. However it comes out — whether a design in a carpet, a painting on a wall, the shaping of a doorway — we recognize that medicinal element because of the instant healing effect, and we call it art. It consoles and heals something in us. That’s why that aspect of things is so important, and why what we want to preserve in civilizations and societies is their art — because it’s a living medicine that we can still use. It still works. We feel it working. Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry this healing. Poetry does it more intensely. Music, maybe, most intensely of all.
Part II, section 5.
Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)
