“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet
Source: The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
VIII. 329–331 (tr. Alexander Pope).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
“Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet
Source: The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems
“Come now: Do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you: you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain.”
Age et his vocabulis esse deos facimus quibus a nobis nominantur? At primum, quot hominum linguae, tot nomina deorum. Non enim, ut tu Velleius, quocumque veneris, sic idem in Italia, idem in Africa, idem in Hispania.
Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman
Book I, section 84
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)
Pope Pius II book The Tale of Two Lovers
Source: The Tale of Two Lovers, 1444, p. xix, preface (in 1933 edition)
“She was like an avenging angel, her vengeance swift and deadly.”
Cassandra Clare (1973) American author
Source: The Lost Herondale
“Behold a God more powerful than I who comes to rule over me.”
Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi.
Dante Alighieri book Vita Nuova
Source: La Vita Nuova (1293), Chapter I (tr. Barbara Reynolds); of love.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor
Last sermon before being imprisoned by the Nazi regime of Germany (27 June 1937), as quoted in Religion in the Reich (1939) by Michael Power, p. 142
“To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm, than all the gloss of art.”
Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village
Source: The Deserted Village (1770), Line 253.
Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist
Song lyrics, Biograph (1985), Up to Me (recorded 1974)
Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic
to redeem
Venice. I was not worthy — nor may man,
Till one as Christ shall come again, be found
Worthy to think, speak, strike, foresee, foretell,
The thought, the word, the stroke, the dawn, the day,
That verily and indeed shall bid the dead
Live, and this old dear land of all men's love
Arise and shine for ever: but if Christ
Came, haply such an one may come, and do
With hands and heart as pure as his a work
That priests themselves may mar not.
Faliero, Act V. Sc. 3.
Marino Faliero (1885)