“What glass unwinking gives our trust
Its image back, what echo names
The names we hurl at namelessness?”
Love's Voice (c.1935–1939)
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Robert Penn Warren 49
American poet, novelist, and literary critic 1905–1989Related quotes
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Context: Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Context: For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
“Name is a fence and within it you are nameless.”
Samuli Paronen, quoted in: M.kumar. Dictionary of Quotations, APH Publishing, 2008. p. 168
“What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name — and moving on.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“Reality is the name we give to our disappointments.”
City Aphorisms, Ninth Selection (1992)
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its features upon it? It confronts the body and longs to pass beyond it, to merge with the other erotic cry hidden in that body, to become one till both may vanish and become deathless by begetting sons.
It approaches the soul and wishes to merge with it inseparably so that "you" and "I" may no longer exist; it blows on the mass of man — kind and wishes, by smashing the resistances of mind and body, to merge all breaths into one violent gale that may lift the earth!
In moments of crisis this Erotic Love swoops down on men and joins them together by force — friends and foes, good and evil. It is a breath superior to all of them, independent of their desires and deeds. It is the spirit, the breathing of God on earth.
It descends on men in whatever form it wishes — as dance, as eros, as hunger, as religion, as slaughter. It does not ask our permission.
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 1, as translated by J.H.McDonald (1996) http://www.wright-house.com/religions/taoism/tao-te-ching.html [Public domain translation]
Context: The tao that can be described
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be spoken
is not the eternal Name.
The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.
The named is the mother of creation.
Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.
By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.
Yet mystery and reality
emerge from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness born from darkness.
The beginning of all understanding.
Quote of Naum Gabo, 1950; as cited in: Eidos: a journal of painting, sculpture and design. Nr.1, p. 31
1936 - 1977