“Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair)
Motive and end and moral in the air;
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.”

—  Robert Graves

"The Devil’s Advice to Story-tellers," lines 19–22, from Collected Poems 1938 (1938).
Poems

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 "Sigh then, or frown, but leave (as in despair) Motive and end and moral in the air; Nice contradiction between fact a…" by Robert Graves?
Robert Graves photo
Robert Graves 117
English poet and novelist 1895–1985

Related quotes

Gunnar Myrdal photo

“There is in fact no contradiction at all between the statement of an exact bookkeeping balance ex post and the obvious inference that in a situation when saving is increasing without a corresponding increase of investment, or perhaps with an adverse movement in investment, there must be a tendency ex ante to a disparity.”

Gunnar Myrdal (1898–1987) Swedish economist

Source: Monetary Equilibrium (1939), p. 46

Wolfgang Pauli photo

“The fact of the existence of two theories [causal and acausal] that contradict each other in Jung … corresponds psychologically to the vascillation between 3 and 4.”

Wolfgang Pauli (1900–1958) Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner

Letter To Carl Alfred Meier (1950)

Cassandra Clare photo

“i would say it was nice to meet you, but the fact is it wasnt. in fact, it was quite awkward.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 61

Shaun Chamberlin photo

“There’s a really interesting thing about despair, I think. It has a spark in it of deep motivation. I think despair can be described as looking at every possible scenario and seeing no hopeful one. But what that means is, if you can present someone in despair with one scenario that looks hopeful – that looks like a real possibility – then there’s this immense wealth of motivation to drive toward it, because despair is not a nice place to be.”

Shaun Chamberlin

Kosmos interview on grief, Dark Optimism, aliveness and activism (2014) http://www.darkoptimism.org/2014/12/21/dark-optimism-power-of-grief/#post-4075

Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

“The whole subject-matter of exact science consists of pointer readings and similar indications.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Source: The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Ch. 10 The New Quantum Theory <!-- p. 219 -->

John Scalzi photo

“There's a difference between the fact that the universe is inherently unfair on a cosmic level, and the fact that life is unfair because people are actively making it so.”

John Scalzi (1969) American science fiction writer
Ursula Goodenough photo

“I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xiv
Context: The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix.
I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies.

Related topics