“It is no use to blame the looking glass if your face is awry.”
Epigraph
The Inspector General (1836)
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Nikolai Gogol 39
Russian writer 1809–1852Related quotes
Source: Pathways to Bliss (2004), p. 104
The She-Ancient, in Pt. V
Source: 1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Context: Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
“The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
Vol. I, ch. 2.
Vanity Fair (1847–1848)
Context: The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.
As quoted in Talks with Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Boston, MA, Little, Brown and Company (1933) pp. 70-71. Mussolini’s interview was in 1932.
1930s
A BANAL POEM, SUBJECT: LOVE http://www.c3.hu/~mediumar/PETVERS1.HTM (1984).
András Petőcz: In Praise of the Sea (1999, ISBN 963 9101 51 6).
Poems
Iraq? They just need to think it through (2007)
Context: What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.
“The fairest face that ever yet
Look'd in a wave as in a glass”
IV, p. 24.
The Ship in the Desert (1875)
Context: p>These be but men. We may forget
The wild sea-king, the tawny brave,
The frowning wold, the woody shore,
The tall-built, sunburnt men of Mars...But what and who was she, the fair?
The fairest face that ever yet
Look'd in a wave as in a glass;
That look'd as look the still, far stars,
So woman-like, into the wave
To contemplate their beauty there,
Yet look as looking anywhere?</p
“You look like Curran. You have that pissy exasperated look on your face.”