“The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.”
Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs
Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 5
Remarks at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (14 June 1956) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations.aspx; Box 895, Senate Speech Files, John F. Kennedy Papers, Pre-Presidential Papers, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library <br class="br">Pre-1960
“The old poets little knew what comfort they could be to a man.”
Sarah Orne Jewett book The Country of the Pointed Firs
Source: The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), Ch. 5
Anne Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), To Cowper (1842)
Context: p>All for myself the sigh would swell,
The tear of anguish start;
I little knew what wilder woe
Had filled the Poet's heart.I did not know the nights of gloom,
The days of misery;
The long, long years of dark despair,
That crushed and tortured thee.</p
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher
Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 43, November 11, 1947.
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist
Source: Walden & Civil Disobedience
Clarence Thomas (1948) Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Page 116
2000s, (2008)
“Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for.”
Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker
As quoted in The Necessity of Art (1959) by Ernst Fischer, Ch. 1
Mikhail Gorbachev (1931) General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
1990s, On My Country and the World (1999)