“How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?”
Adam Bede (1859)
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George Eliot 300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880Related quotes
undated quote about his own poetry; in ' Objects Are What We Aren't' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/02/26/objects-are-what-we-arent/, by Andy Battaglia; The Parish Review, February 26, 2015

Man's Search for Meaning (1946; 1959; 1984)
Context: A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth — that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. … For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory."

Source: The World We Want (2000), Chapter 4, Spaces And Dreams, p. 159.

“Our best thoughts come from others.”

Chap. 1: "To Whom Much is Forgiven..."
The New Being (1955)

" Hands All Round http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/T/TennysonAlfred/verse/tiresias/handsallround.html", l. 1-4 (1885)