“The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!”
Part I, stanza 15.
Peter Bell (1798)
Tom Bowling (c. 1788).
“The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witchery of the soft blue sky!”
Part I, stanza 15.
Peter Bell (1798)
Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer
Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 1 (p. 1)
Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader
sa brahmacārī nijadharmacārī svakarmacārī ca na cābhicārī ।
cārī satāṃ cetasi nāticārī sa cāpacārī sa na cāpacārī ॥
Śrībhārgavarāghavīyam
Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi
"The Holy Dimension", p. 331
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist
Love’s Last Lesson
The Golden Violet (1827)
Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) American architect
So, the flowers of your field, in so far as I am gardener, shall come from my heart where they reside in much good will; and my eye and hand shall attend merely to the cultivating, the weeding, the fungous blight, the noxious insect of the air, and the harmful worm below.
And so shall your garden grow; from the rich soil of the humanities it will rise up and unfold in beauty in the pure air of the spirit.
So shall your thoughts take up the sap of strong and generous impulse, and grow and branch, and run and climb and spread, blooming and fruiting, each after its kind, each flowing toward the fulfillment of its normal and complete desire. Some will so grow as to hug the earth in modest beauty; others will rise, through sunshine and storm, through drought and winter's snows year after year, to tower in the sky; and the birds of the air will nest therein and bring forth their young.
Such is the garden of the heart: so oft neglected and despised when fallow.
Verily, there needs a gardener, and many gardens.
Source: Kindergarten Chats (1918), Ch. 4 : The Garden
Jacques Monod (1910–1976) French biologist
Monod (1971) Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology. p. 180
Theodore Zeldin (1933) English academic
An Intimate History of Humanity (1994)
Context: Even Gandhi, with all his charisma, did not "melt the hearts" of his oppressors, as he had hoped. After softening, hearts harden again. Asoka too was wrong to think that he was changing the course of history, and that his righteousness would last "as long as the sun and the moon."