“For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”
To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesy (1627).
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Michael Drayton 10
English poet 1563–1631Related quotes

“The jealous is possessed by a "fine mad devil" and a dull spirit at once.”
No. 345
In William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act 5, sc. 1, Falstaff says that Mistress Ford's husband has "the finest mad devil of jealousy in him".
Aphorisms on Man (1788)

Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 172
"Therefore All Poems Are Elegies" in New Poems : 1940 : An Anthology of British and American Verse (1941) edited by Oscar Williams, p. 15

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 8, “The Future Evolution of the Brain” (p. 224)

“Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.”
1900s, "The Study of Mathematics" (November 1907)
Context: Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry. What is best in mathematics deserves not merely to be learnt as a task, but to be assimilated as a part of daily thought, and brought again and again before the mind with ever-renewed encouragement.