“Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.”
"I Think of Those Who Were Truly Great"
Poems (1933)
Context: What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit." by Stephen Spender?
Stephen Spender 76
English poet and man of letters 1909–1995Related quotes
Rumi
(1207–1273) Iranian poet
"A Community of the Spirit" in Ch. 1 : The Tavern, p. 2
Disputed, The Essential Rumi (1995)
“You never realized how thick your fog was until it lifted.”
Jessica Bird
(1969) U.S. novelist
Source: Lover Reborn
Arthur Ponsonby
(1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist
Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction
Context: War is fought in this fog of falsehood, a great deal of it undiscovered and accepted as truth. The fog arises from fear and is fed by panic. Any attempt to doubt or deny even the most fantastic story has to be condemned at once as unpatriotic, if not traitorous. This allows a free field for the rapid spread of lies. If they were only used to deceive the enemy in the game of war it would not be worth troubling about. But, as the purpose of most of them is to fan indignation and induce the flower of the country's youth to be ready to make the supreme sacrifice, it becomes a serious matter. Exposure, therefore, may be useful, even when the struggle is over, in order to show up the fraud, hypocrisy, and humbug on which all war rests, and the blatant and vulgar devices which have been used for so long to prevent the poor ignorant people from realizing the true meaning of war.
Elisabeth Elliot
(1926–2015) American missionary
Source: Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
(1802–1838) English poet and novelist
(1837 1) (Vol. 49) Necessity
The Monthly Magazine
Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter
(1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter
Thus It Is, 1989, p. 164
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is
Hans Christian von Baeyer
(1938) American physicist
von Baeyer did not originate the quip about time, which dates back at least as far as the 1929 book "The Man Who Mastered Time" by Ray Cummings, where it appears on p. 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=YdZEAAAAYAAJ&q=%22everything+from+happening+at+once%22#search_anchor.
Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 14, Noise, Nuisance and necessity, p. 127-128