Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has — the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
In Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963), p. 118.
Source: Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (1995), Ch. 3. Models and Metaphors
“You are unique, and if that is not fulfilled, then something has been lost.”
Written at an Inn at Henley (1758), st. 6. Compare: " From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,— Path, motive, guide, original, and end", Samuel Johnson, Motto to the Rambler, No. 7
“Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.”
Speech at West Point (5 December 1962), in Vital Speeches, January 1, 1963, page 163.
Source: posthumous, Jean Dubuffet, Works, writings Interviews, 2006, p. 9
