“Admitting you are a nature poet, nowadays, may make you seem something of a fool!”
Baler Twine
“Admitting you are a nature poet, nowadays, may make you seem something of a fool!”
Baler Twine
“Any fool can make a rule
And every fool will mind it.”
February 3, 1860
Journals (1838-1859)
Source: http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals_pdfs/J15f4-f6.pdf#page=289
Source: Journal #14
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XIV
Context: I thought of all those wise men, poets, artists before me who had suffered, wept, and smiled on the road to truth. I thought of the Latin poet who wished to reassure and console men by showing them truth as unveiled as a statue. A fragment of his prelude came to my mind, learned long ago, then dismissed and lost like almost everything that I had taken the pains to learn up till then. He said he kept watch in the serene nights to find the words, the poem in which to convey to men the ideas that would deliver them. For two thousand years men have always had to be reassured and consoled. For two thousand years I have had to be delivered. Nothing has changed the surface of things. The teachings of Christ have not changed the surface of things, and would not even if men had not ruined His teachings so that they can no longer follow them honestly. Will the great poet come who shall settle the boundaries of belief and render it eternal, the poet who will be, not a fool, not an ignorant orator, but a wise man, the great inexorable poet? I do not know, although the lofty words of the man who died in the boarding-house have given me a vague hope of his coming and the right to adore him already.
“You are a fool, sir priest. Ignorance may excuse you. It will certainly kill you.”
Source: Ars Magica (1989), Chapter 2 (p. 18)
(from vol 2, letter 13: 29 Nov 1778, to Mr S___ in Madras).
He stated when he deviated from the Valmiki Ramayana epic story and was criticized for the changes made. Quoted in [Mandakranta Bose Director of the Center for India and South Asia Research and the Institute of Asian Research University of British Columbia, The Ramayana Revisited, http://books.google.com/books?id=F_vuoXvAUfQC&pg=PA140, 1 September 2004, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-803763-7, 140–]