“They think how one life hums, revolves and toils,
One cog in a golden singing hive…”
"The Funeral" (l. 13–14)
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Stephen Spender 76
English poet and man of letters 1909–1995Related quotes
“How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.”
Part 2, Chapter 5 (p. 22)
Fiction, The Female Man (1975)
Contemplation. Compare: "The sad vicissitude of things", Laurence Sterne, Sermon xvi.
The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
The Intelligence Agents (1996)
“I would rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach 10,000 stars how not to dance.”
Collected Poems (1938) New Poems 22
Variant: I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
“People who think they know me would be surprised that my whole life doesn't revolve around sex.”
Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Legendary Portrayal", by David Walstad. The Philadelphia Inquirer TV Week (USA). May 21, 1995. p. 4-5.
on being categorized as a sex-symbol.
Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)
Context: Saint Thomas is still alive and overshadows as many schools as he ever did; at all events as many as the Church maintains. He has outlived Descartes and Leibnitz and a dozen other schools of philosophy more or less serious in their day. He has mostly outived Hume, Voltaire and the militant sceptics. His method is typical and classic; his sentences, when interpreted by the Church, seem, even to an untrained mind, intelligible and consistent; his Church Intellectual remains practically unchanged, and, like the Cathedral of Beauvais, erect although the storms of six or seven centuries have prostrated, over and over again, every other social or political or juristic shelter. Compared with it, all modern systems are complex and chaotic, crowded with self-contradictions, anomalies, impracticable functions and out-worn inheritances; but beyond all their practical shortcomings is their fragmentary character. An economic civilisation troubles itself about the universe much as a hive of honey-bees troubles about the ocean, only as a region to be avoided. The hive of Saint Thomas sheltered God and Man, Mind and Matter, The Universe and the Atom, the One and the Multiple, within the walls of a harmonious home.
“How many women does one need to sing the scale of love all the way up and down?”
Act I.
Leonce and Lena (1838)
