Source: Wings of Fire, p. 106.
“The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.”
The Choice http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1602/, st. 1
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)
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Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refus…" by W.B. Yeats?
W.B. Yeats 255
Irish poet and playwright 1865–1939Related quotes
Source: The Boat of a Million Years (1989), Chapter 12 “The Last Medicine” (p. 215)
Diadochos of Photiki
(400–486) Byzantine saint
§ 28
On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination (480 AD)
Bertrand Russell
(1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist
Letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell in 1912, as quoted in Clark The life of Bertrand Russell (1976), p. 174
1910s
Lionel Johnson
(1867–1902) English poet
By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)
Context: p>King, tried in fires of woe!
Men hunger for thy grace:
And through the night I go,
Loving thy mournful face. Yet, when the city sleeps;
When all the cries are still:
The stars and heavenly deeps
Work out a perfect will.</p
Uncle Einar (1947)
R Is for Rocket (1962)
“Wodehouse is very interesting. There must be all kinds of darknesses in that man's life.”
John Banville
(1945) Irish writer
Oblique dreamer (2000)
Theodore Roosevelt
(1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States
Responding to the social theories of Benjamin Kidd, in "Kidd's 'Social Evolution'" in The North American Review (July 1895), p. 109
1890s
Context: A perfectly stupid race can never rise to a very high plane; the negro, for instance, has been kept down as much by lack of intellectual development as by anything else; but the prime factor in the preservation of a race is its power to attain a high degree of social efficiency. Love of order, ability to fight well and breed well, capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community, these and similar rather humdrum qualities go to make up the sum of social efficiency. The race that has them is sure to overturn the race whose members have brilliant intellects, but who are cold and selfish and timid, who do not breed well or fight well, and who are not capable of disinterested love of the community. In other words, character is far more important than intellect to the race as to the individual. We need intellect, and there is no reason why we should not have it together with character; but if we must choose between the two we choose character without a moment's hesitation.