Source: Pensées Philosophiques (1746), Ch. 5, as quoted in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
Discourses on the Condition of the Great
“In order to know men, something must be chanced. Who risks himself of nothing knows nothing.”
“He who desires everything, has nothing.”
Chi tutto vuole, nulla non ha.
Act I., Scene II. — (Lucido Tolto).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 273.
I Lucidi (published 1549)
“The Muse gave the Greeks their native character, and allowed them to speak in noble tones, they who desired nothing but praise.”
Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo
Musa loqui, præter laudem nullius avaris. . .
Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo
Musa loqui, præter laudem nullius avaris. . .
Line 323
Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC)
"The Snow Man"
Harmonium (1923)
Context: p>One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.</p
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Moral Letters to Lucilius), Letter XCII: On the Happy Life
“He who has no poetry in himself will find poetry in nothing.”
