“Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite.”

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Table-Talk (1857)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Every great poem is in itself limited by necessity, — but in its suggestions unlimited and infinite." by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow photo

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 202

American poet 1807–1882

Related quotes

“As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits.”

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) French novelist, dramatist, scientist and duelist

The Other World (1657)
Context: As God has made the soul immortal, he has made the universe infinite, if it is true that eternity is nothing other than unlimited duration and infinity is space without limits. Suppose the universe were not infinite: God himself would be finite, because he could not be where there is nothing, and he could not increase the size of the universe without adding to his own size and come to be where he had not been before.

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had nothewould be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has aThisof the infinite is God.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“Right is not unlimited, but is limited by the laws.”

Aeschines (-389–-314 BC) Attic orator; statesman

199.
Ctesiphontem

“For truth itself does not have the privilege to be employed at any time and in every way; its use, noble as it is, has its circumscriptions and limits.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

“The really great writers are people like Emily Brontë who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

As quoted in "The Michener Phenomenon" by Caryn James in The New York Times (8 September 1985)

“Philosophy is an everlasting fire, sometimes damped down by setting itself limits, then flaring into new life as it consumes them. Every field of inquiry is limited, but philosophy has an essential relation to the question of limits, to its own limits.”

David Wood (1946) British philosopher, born 1946

Introduction, p. xiii
Philosophy At The Limit (1990)

“Let us not limit the resources of nature; they are infinite, especially when reinforced by great art.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

“A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of unlimited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise. If Mrs. Thatcher said that free choice is to be exercised more in the market place than in the ballot box, she has merely uttered the truism that the first is indispensable for individual freedom, while the second is not: free choice can at least exist under a dictatorship that can limit itself but not under the government of an unlimited democracy which cannot.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Letter to The Times http://coreyrobin.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/hayek-letter-to-the-times-july-11-1978.pdf (11 July 1978), p. 15
1960s–1970s

“Every person is worthy of an infinite wealth of love — the beauty of his soul knows no limit.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Glimpses of Bengal http://www.spiritualbee.com/tagore-book-of-letters/ (1921)

“The Pythagoreans associated good and evil with the limited and unlimited, respectively.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

Source: Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (1972), p. 175

Related topics