II, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Two Songs From a Play http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1741/
Context: Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
“On some preference esteem is based;
To esteem everything is to esteem nothing.”
Sur quelque préférence une estime se fonde,
Et c'est n'estimer rien qu'estimer tout le monde.
Act I, sc. i
Le Misanthrope (1666)
“Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.”
“Heroism is endurance for one moment more.”
This was an old saying of mountaineers of the Caucasus which Kennan quoted in a 1921 letter to Henry Munroe Rogers, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations 16th Edition, and in Mental Disorders In The Social Environment : Critical Perspectives (2005) by Stuart A. Kirk, p. 31
Misattributed
“I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”
Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book X, 3
George Gordon, Lord Byron, from The Works of Lord Byron, ed. Rowland E. Prothero (1901), vol. V: Letters and Journals, ch. XXIII: "Detached Thoughts" (15 October 1821 - 18 May 1822), paragraph 72 (p. 445)
Misattributed
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
“No man is esteemed for gay garments but by fools and women.”
Source: Instructions to his Son and to Posterity (published 1632), Chapter VII
“Goodness can endure a few moments; holiness is life-defining.”
“A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating”
As quoted in Shoptalk: learning to write with writers (1990), edited by Donald Morison Murray<!-- Cook Publishers -->
General sources
Context: A man is a fool not to put everything he has, at any given moment, into what he is creating. You're there now doing the thing on paper. You're not killing the goose, you're just producing an egg. So I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working. I have never had the problem of a writing block. I've heard about it. I've felt reluctant to write on some days, for whole weeks, or sometimes even longer. I'd much rather go fishing, for example, or go sharpen pencils, or go swimming, or what not. But, later, coming back and reading what I have produced, I am unable to detect the difference between what came easily and when I had to sit down and say, 'Well, now it's writing time and now I'll write.' There's no difference on paper between the two.
