“For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.”
Source: The Faerie Queene
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Edmund Spenser 53
English poet 1552–1599Related quotes
"Ulysses" from Poems 1930-1933 (1933)<!-- li -->
Poems
Context: His wiles were witty and his fame far known,
Every king's daughter sought him for her own,
Yet he was nothing to be won or lost.
All lands to him were Ithaca: love-tossed
He loathed the fraud, yet would not bed alone.
“Nothing is so difficult but that it may be found out by seeking.”
Nil tam difficile est quin quaerendo investigari possit.
Act IV, scene 2, line 8 (675).
Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
“A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.”
Amicum qui diu quaeritur, vix invenitur, difficile servatur.
Letter 3
Letters
Source: The Life of Poetry (1949), Chapter One : The Fear of Poetry
Context: In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves.
If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun.
Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has — the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
