“What a visionary thing is the independence of youth! how full of projects, which take the shape of certainties! How much of rugged and stern experience it requires to convince the young and the eager, that the efforts of an individual unaided by connexion or circumstance, are the true reading of the allegory of the Danaides : —industry and skill, alas, how often are they but water drawn with labour into a bucket full of holes!”

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

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 "What a visionary thing is the independence of youth! how full of projects, which take the shape of certainties! How muc…" by Letitia Elizabeth Landon?

Letitia Elizabeth Landon785

English poet and novelist 1802–1838

Related quotes

“In modern industry there is very little that the individual can do by his unaided efforts.”

Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse (1864–1929) British sociologist

Source: Liberalism (1911), Chapter VIII, Economic Liberalism, p. 99.

“How cruel, your veins are full of ice-water and mine are boiling.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

“How fleeting the sorrows of youth, how slight the foundations on which the young build towers of despair”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

"Forward" to Yesterdays 1910 edition

“How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
How little I knew, or which of them was the one
To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.”

Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966) American poet

"I am a Book I neither Wrote nor Read" http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/collectedstories/writing/write_ds_poetry.html <br class="br">Selected Poems: Summer Knowledge (1959)

“How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

“How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real?”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Space (1912)
Context: How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus.