Quotes about verse
page 2

“It is America's opportunity to lay the foundations for a new flowering of English verse, and to lay them as broad as they are strong.”

John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) American writer

Preface to Irradiations; Sand and Spray, 1915

Flowers, Strong

“None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.”
Nec satis apparet, cur versus factitet.

Horace Ars Poetica

Source: Ars Poetica, or The Epistle to the Pisones (c. 18 BC), Line 470 (tr. Conington)

Love

“The reviewer is aware… he has given an imperfect account of this remarkable book. That Klein's researches constitute a splendid advance in dynamics of the rotation of a rigid body there can be no question. One cannot but hope that the outline given in these Princeton lectures may soon be expanded and put in shape more easily assimilated by persons more moderately versed in the theory of elliptic functions.”

Carl Barus (1856–1935) U.S. physicist

"The Mathematical Theory of the Top" (April 8, 1898)

Books, Hope, Question, Personality

“I decided not to tell lies in verse. Not to feign any emotions that I did not feel.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

The Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers, Stanford University Press (2001) ISBN 978-0804738903

Feeling

“And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Then to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native wood-notes wild,
And ever, against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,
Married to immortal verse
Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 127; comparable to: "Wisdom married to immortal verse", William Wordsworth, The Excursion, book vii

Youth, Dreams, Soul, Learning

“Cheer'd up himself with ends of verse
And sayings of philosophers.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto III, line 1011
Source: Hudibras, Part I (1663–1664)

“Repitition is the mother of knowledge. To help our children retain God's Word, we repeated a verse six times with them, then gave them a reward (a candy bar) when they had memorized ten verses. I have calculated that we had around six thousand family devotions with our children. The three of them made it through their teenage years without an ounce of rebellion.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

God doesn't believe in atheists (2002)

God, Children, Family, Knowledge

“[Zuanne de Tonini] da Coi… impuned Tartaglia to publish his method, but the latter declined to do so. In 1539 Cardan wrote to Tartaglia, and a meeting was arranged at which, Tartaglia says, having pledged Cardan to secrecy, he revealed the method in cryptic verse and later with a full explanation. Cardan admits that he received the solution from Tartaglia, but… without any explanation. At any rate, the two cubics x^3 + ax^2 = c and x^3 + bx = c could now be solved. The reduction of the general cubic x^3 + ax^2 + bx = c to the second of these forms does not seem to have been considered by Tartaglia at the time of the controversy. When Cardan published his Ars Magna however, he transformed the types x^3 = ax^2 + c and x^3 + ax^2 = c by substituting x = y + \frac{1}{3}a and x = y - \frac{1}{3}a respectively, and transformed the type x^3 + c = ax^2 by the substitution x = \sqrt[3]{c^2/y}, thus freeing the equations of the term x^2. This completed the general solution, and he applied the method to the complete cubic in his later problems.”

David Eugene Smith (1860–1944) American mathematician

Source: History of Mathematics (1925) Vol.2, p.461

Problem, Time

“Perhaps it is the human imagination that is the monster,’ he said. ‘I believe no animal suffers from the torments of the imagination. Only man…’
‘The imagination is capable of enacting the very best in us, and the very worst,’ agreed Hor, ‘and I know what mine would like to do to some people.’
‘Your verse is torment enough,’ quipped the architect.
‘And that is why civilized life, morality, ethics and so on, matter. We are half-enlightened, and half-monstrous,’ said Nakht assertively. ‘We must build our civility upon reason and mutual benefit.’
Sobek raised his cup.
‘I salute your reason. I wish it every success.”

Nick Drake (poet) (1961) British writer

ibid
The Rahotep series, Book 2: Tutankhamun

Life, People, Imagination, Suffering

“Before the conquest, the Filipinos had a literature written in characters of their own, and its manifestation in verse constituted of maxims, proverbs, boat-songs, nuptial-songs, war songs, love-songs, and the like.”

Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) Filipino politician

As a quote in Quirino & Hilario's "Short History of Tagalog Literature" in Thinking for Ourselves. Manila Oriental Co. 1924, p. 56-57.

Love, War, Literature

“Until quite recently poetry was taught badly—at least according to current academic standards. Poetry was used to teach grammar, elocution, and rhetoric. It was employed to convey history, both secular and sacred, often to instill patriotic sentiment and religious morality. Poetry was chanted in chorus at female academies. It was copied to teach cursive handwriting and calligraphy. It was memorized by wayward schoolboys as punishment. It was recited by children at public events and family gatherings. Being able to write verse was considered a social grace in both domestic and public life. Going to school meant becoming well versed.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

24
Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991), Poetry as Enchantment (2015)

Life, Children, School, Family

“Let us assume that we invited an unknown person to a game of cards. If this person answered us, “I don’t play,” we would either interpret this to mean that he did not understand the game, or that he had an aversion to it which arose from economic, ethical, or other reasons. Let us imagine, however, that an honorable man, who was known to possess every possible skill in the game, and who was well versed in its rules and its forbidden tricks, but who could like a game and participate in it only when it was an innocent pastime, were invited into a company of clever swindlers, who were known as good players and to whom he was equal on both scores, to join them in a game. If he said, “I do not play,” we would have to join him in looking the people with whom he was talking straight in the face, and would be able to supplement his words as follows: “I don’t play, that is, with people such as you, who break the rules of the game, and rob it of its pleasure. If you offer to play a game, our mutual agreement, then, is that we recognize the capriciousness of chance as our master; and you call the science of your nimble fingers chance, and I must accept it as such, it I will, or run the risk of insulting you or choose the shame of imitating you.” … The opinion of Socrates can be summarized in these blunt words, when he said to the Sophists, the leaned men of his time, “I know nothing.””

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Therefore these words were a thorn in their eyes and a scourge on their backs.
Socratic Memorabilia, J. Flaherty, trans. (Baltimore: 1967), pp. 165-167.

Men, People, Pleasure, Imagination

“I see in painters prose writers and poets. Rhyme, measure, and the turning of verses, which is indispensable and which gives them so much vigor, are analogous to the hidden symmetry, to the equilibrium at once wise and inspired, which governs the meeting or separation of lines and spaces, the echoes of color, etc….. but the beauty of verse does not consist of exactitude in obeying rules... It resides in a thousand secret harmonies and conventions which make up the power of poetry and which go straight to the imagination; in just the same way the happy choice of forms and the right understanding of their relationship act on the imagination in the art of painting.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix's Journal of 19 September 1847; as cited in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 229
1831 - 1863

Happiness, Secret, Beauty, Art

“Verse no longer stands at the centre of communicative discourse. It is no longer, as it was from Homer to Milton, the natural repository of knowledge and traditional sentiment. It no longer gives to society its main record of past grandeur or its natural setting for prophecy, as it did in Virgil and Dante. Verse has grown private. It is a special language which the individual poet insinuates, by force of personal genius, into the awareness of his contemporaries, persuading to learn and perhaps hand on his own uses of words. Poetry has become essentially lyric — that is to say, it is the poetry of private vision rather than of public or of national occasion.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. IX (p. 309).

Communication, Nature, Knowledge, Learning

“Pitiful, to be sure, is what the pragmatic philosophy of the French and English is. … They are considered to be so well versed in the knowledge of what man is, despite their failure to speculate on what he should be.”

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) German theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar

Jämmerlich ist freilich jene praktische Philosophie der Franzosen und Engländer, von denen man meint, sie wüßten so gut, was der Mensch sei, unerachtet sie nicht darüber spekulierten, was er sein solle.
Cited in Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), "Athenaeum Fragments" (1798), § 355.

Failure, Knowledge

“People who have sinned against such a holy place are sure to suffer the consequences of their misdeeds at no distant date in this Kali age in accordance with the verse: Hasadbhih kriyate karma rudadbhir-anubhuyate (People do [evil] deeds smilingly but suffer the consequences crying).”

Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) Ruler of the Sultanate of Mysore

Tipu expressing grief against Maratha raid on Sringeri temple and matha. Quoted in Annual Report of the Mysore Archaeological Department 1916 pages 10–11 and 73–6 and History of Tipu Sultan https://books.google.com/books?id=hkbJ6xA1_jEC&pg=PA358 by Mohibbul Hasan, p. 358

People, Age, Suffering, Distant

“Mr. Soame Jenyns, a writer of verse and member of the Board of Trade… In twenty three very small pages he had disposed of the "Objections to the Taxation of Our American Colonies" in a manner highly satisfactory to himself and doubtless also to the average reading Briton, who understood constitutional questions best when they were "briefly considered," and when they were humorously expounded in pamphlets that could be had for sixpence…. The heart of the question was the proposition that there should be no taxation without representation; upon which principle it was necessary to observe only that many individuals in England, such as copyholders and leaseholders, and many communities, such as Manchester and Birmingham, were taxed in Parliament without being represented there. "… are they only Englishmen when they solicit protection, but not Englishmen when taxes are required to enable this country to protect them?" As for "liberty," the word had so many meanings, "having within a few years been used as a synonymous term for Blasphemy, Bawdy, Treason, Libels, Strong Beer, and Cyder," that Mr. Jenyns could not presume to say what it meant.”

Carl L. Becker (1873–1945) American historian

The Eve of the Revolution (1918)

Communication, Beer, Question, Strong

“What terrible moments does one feel after one has engaged for a large work! In the beginning of my translating the Iliad, I wished any body would hang me a hundred times. It sat so heavily on my mind at first, that I often used to dream of it; and do so sometimes still. When I fell into the method of translating 30 or 40 verses before I got up, and piddled with it the rest of the morning, it went on easily enough; and when I was thoroughly got into the way of it, I did the rest with pleasure. […] The Iliad took me up six years, and during that time, and particularly the first part of it, I was often under great pain and apprehensions. Though I conquered the thoughts of it in the day, they would frighten me in the night. I dreamed often of being engaged in a long journey, and that I should never get to the end of it. This made so strong an impression upon me, that I sometimes dream of it still; of being engaged in that translation, of having got about half way through it, and being embarrassed, and under dread of never completing it.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

As quoted in Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [arranged, with notes, by the late Edmund Malone], pp. 28–29 & 53–54.
Attributed

Pain, Pleasure, Dreams, Way

“Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,—
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death, ere thou hast slain another,
Learn'd and fair and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). This epitaph is generally ascribed to Ben Jonson. It appears in the editions of his Works; but in a manuscript collection of Browne's poems preserved amongst the Lansdowne MS. No. 777, in the British Museum, it is ascribed to Browne, and awarded to him by Sir Egerton Brydges in his edition of Browne's poems.

Death, Sister, Time

“It seemed strange to me that someone who painted big, scary abstractions should have been so commonsensical in her literary tastes, though later I would discover that twelve-tone composers read Keats just as experimental poets listened to Glenn Miller — few people are avant-garde outside their own domain.I suppose that as Midwesterners, the children of chemical engineers and homemakers, we experienced the arts as so foreign, even so preposterously unreasonable, that once we’d decided to embrace them we did so with lots of conviction and little discrimination. Surely it was no accident that T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the two great poetic synthesists of our day, the very men who had ransacked all of world culture and could refer in the same poem to the Buddha and to Sophocles or to Confucius and to Jefferson — it was no accident that they were both from the heartland. Public-library intellectuals, magpies of knowledge, like most autodidacts we were incapable of evaluating our sources. As a teen-ager, I tried to write verse like Milton’s; later, I wanted to write novels like Nabokov’s. In a novel I wrote in college, I imitated Evelyn Waugh. If someone had said to me, "But do you, the graceless son of a Cincinnati broker of chemical equipment, do you seriously imagine that you can just write a Renaissance Christian epic or something in the style of a Cambridge-educated Russian aristocrat or of the spokesman of the Bright Young Things of London circa 1925?"”

Edmund White (1940) American novelist and LGBT essayist

if someone had spoken like this to me, I wouldn’t even have understood his point. My Women.The New Yorker https://archive.is/20121204150452/www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050613fa_fact 6 June 2005 Articles and Interviews

Men, Children, People, World

“It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.”

Jorge Luis Borges book Evaristo Carriego: A Book About Old-Time Buenos Aires

Evaristo Carriego (1930) Ch. 3

Books, Art, Parting

“You praise, in three hundred verses, Sabellus, the baths of Ponticus, who gives such excellent dinners. You wish to dine, Sabellus, not to bathe.”
Laudas balnea versibus trecentis Cenantis bene Pontici, Sabelle. Vis cenare, Sabelle, non lavari.

Martial book Epigrammata

Laudas balnea versibus trecentis
Cenantis bene Pontici, Sabelle.
Vis cenare, Sabelle, non lavari.
IX, 19.
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

“Many times I recall my father, with my mother and us children in tow, going up to the pastor after a service. With Bible in hand he would challenge the pastor about some of the things he said in his sermon, quoting Scriptures that resounded with the words "Thus said the Lord," or "It is written…"… (To this day, when I quote verses that contain these phrases, an image of my father confronting the liberal pastors pops into my mind!)”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

Raising Godly Children in an Ungodly World: Leaving a Lasting Legacy (2008)

Children, Quotes, Time

“Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose; prose may be written as very beautiful free verse. Which is which?”

John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945) American academic

Nation (February 1916)

Beauty

“I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Napalm and Silly Putty (2001)

Books

“All the men who are now called discoverers, in every matter ruled by thought, have been men versed in the minds of their predecessors, and learned in what had been before them. There is not one exception. I do not say that every man has made direct acquantance with the whole of his mental ancestry… But… it is remarkable how many of the greatest names in all departments of knowledge have been real antiquaries in their several subjects.
I may cite among those… in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke.”

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871) British mathematician, philosopher and university teacher (1806-1871)

A Budget of Paradoxes (1872)

Men, Knowledge, Learning, Science

“There were certain impressions I wanted to fix. I read verse models but none seemed to suitably express that kind of impression.. until I came to read French vers libre which seemed to eactly fitr the case.”

T. E. Hulme (1883–1917) English Imagist poet and critic

Lecture on Modern Poetry (1914)

Reading

“Mariam is never very far, she is here, in these walls they've repainted, in the trees they've planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children's laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westward. But, mostly, Miriam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), Chapter, 51.

Children, Books, Laughter, Tree

“"These blue days and this sun of childhood". It was his last verse, found on his jacket after he died. It always appears at the end of all publications of his works.”

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) Spanish poet

"Estos días azules y este sol de infancia" Bookrags wiki http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Antonio_Machado

Appearance, Sun, Childhood

“I suppose that I am a very serious poet – except for satirical verse, which I have also been compelled to write, though much of it may be inferior to my more serious poems – perhaps because I am not playful enough by nature, and even my satirical or polemical verse is not entertaining.”

Michael Hamburger (1924–2007) British translator, poet, critic, memoirist and academic

Interview with Lidia Vianu http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/Michael%20Hamburger.htm

Nature

“There was another prominent fact to which I drew the attention of Mahatma Gandhi. Both of us went together one night to the Khilafat Conference at Nagpur. The Ayats (verses) of the Quran recited by the Maulanas on that occasion, contained frequent references to Jihad and killing of the Kaffirs. But when I drew his attention to this phase of the Khilafat movement, Mahatmaji smiled and said, ' They are alluding to the British Bureaucracy '. In reply I said that it was all subversive of the idea of non-violence and when the reversion of feeling came the Mahomedan Maulanas would not refrain from using these verses against the Hindus.”

Swami Shraddhanand (1856–1926) Indian monk and philosopher

July 1926, The Liberator. Quoted from B.R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or The Partition of India (1946)

Smile, Feeling, Idea, Night

“Stop abusing my verses, or publish some of your own.”

Martial book Epigrammata

I, 91.
Epigrams (c. 80 – 104 AD)

“Don't talk about my moms yo, sometimes he rhyme quick sometimes he rhyme slow, or vice versa. Whip up a slice o' nice verse pie, hit it on the first try, Villain…the worst guy.”

MF Doom (1971) hip hop artist from America

As Madvillain, "ALL CAPS", Madvillainy (2004)
Sourced Lines

Guy, Moms

“The Buddha said, "Elements come together and form this body. At the time of appearing, elements appear. At the time of disappearing, elements disappear. When elements appear, I do not say "I" appear. When elements disappear, I do not say "I" disappear. Past moments and future moments do not arise in sequence. Past elements and future elements are not in alignment. This is the meaning of ocean mudra samadhi."
Closely investigate these words by the Buddha. Attaining the way and entering realization does not necessarily require extensive learning or realization. Anyone can attain the way through a simple verse of four lines. Even scholars of extensive learning can enter realization through a one line verse.”

Dogen (1200–1253) Japanese Zen buddhist teacher

Ocean Mudra Samadhi (1242)

Way, Learning, Appearance, Time

“Verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty”

R.S. Thomas (1913–2000) Welsh poet

"Poetry For Supper"
Poetry For Supper (1958)

Beauty, Flowers, Nature

“Railing in other men may be a crime,
But ought to pass for mere instinct in him:
Instinct he follows and no further knows,
For to write verse with him is to transpose.”

John Dryden Absalom and Achitophel

Pt. II, line 440.
Absalom and Achitophel (1681)

Men

“So when I'm killed, don't wait for me,
Walking the dim corridor;
In Heaven or Hell, don't wait for me,
Or you must wait for evermore.
You'll find me buried, living-dead
In these verses that you've read.”

Robert Graves (1895–1985) English poet and novelist

"When I'm Killed"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)

Hell, Waiting, Reading, Dead

“In our constant struggle to believe we are likely to overlook the simple fact that a bit of healthy disbelief is sometimes as needful as faith to the welfare of our souls. I would go further and say that we would do well to cultivate a reverent skepticism. It will keep us out of a thousand bogs and quagmires where others who lack it sometimes find themselves. It is no sin to doubt some things, but it may be fatal to believe everything. Faith is at the root of all true worship, and without faith it is impossible to please God. Through unbelief Israel failed to inherit the promises. “By grace are ye saved through faith.” “The just shall live by faith.” Such verses as these come trooping to our memories, and we wince just a little at the suggestion that unbelief may also be a good and useful thing. … Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything. Faith engages the person and promises of God and rests upon them with perfect assurance. Whatever has behind it the character and word of the living God is accepted by faith as the last and final truth from which there must never be any appeal. Faith never asks questions when it has been established that God has spoken. 'Yea, let God be true, but every man a liar' (Rom. 3:4). Thus faith honors God by counting Him righteous and accepts His testimony against the very evidence of its own senses. That is faith, and of such we can never have too much. Credulity, on the other hand, never honors God, for it shows as great a readiness to believe anybody as to believe God Himself. The credulous person will accept anything as long as it is unusual, and the more unusual it is the more ardently he will believe. Any testimony will be swallowed with a straight face if it only has about it some element of the eerie, the preternatural, the unearthly.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

Source: The Root of the Righteous (1955), Chapter 34.

God, Truth, Faith, Soul

“But experience has shown that to be true which Appius says in his verses, that every man is the architect of his own fortune.”
Sed res docuit id verum esse, quod in carminibus Appius ait, fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae.

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

I.i.2
Epistulae ad Caesarem senem

“Once you experience love, I'm persuaded
you'll know what I'm on about in my verses.”

Luís de Camões (1524–1580) Portuguese poet

Sabei que, segundo o amor tiverdes,
Tereis o entendimento de meus versos.
As translated by Landeg White in The Collected Lyric Poems of Luis de Camoes (2016), p. 25
Lyric poetry, Sonnets, Enquanto quis Fortuna que tivesse

Love

“He wrote down everything he saw and heard, and most of his thoghts, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose. It could take him many hours to write in his diary a survey of one full day: everything was an experience, any noteworthy observation which some nameless person might make was a new vista, any insignificant piece of information was a new sunrise, any ordinary poem he read for the first time was the beginning of a new epoch like a flight around the globe; the world was multiform, magnificent and opulent, and he loved it.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book Two: The Palace of the Summerland

Love, World, Time, Reading

“The so-called obscurity of modernist literature has, of course, a lot to do with the new stress on exegesis. When the overt meaning of a work can no longer be taken for granted, criticism is forced — or seems forced — to undertake the explication of the text of the work before doing anything else. But experience has shown us by now that the drift and shape of an "obscure" poem or novel can be grasped for the purposes of art without being "worked out." Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"T.S. Eliot: A Book Review" (1950/1956), p. 244
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Art, Literature, Success, Parting

“Tis verse that gives
Immortal youth to mortal maids.”

Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) British writer

Verse.

Youth

“Some force whole regions, in despite
O' geography, to change their site;
Make former times shake hands with latter,
And that which was before come after.
But those that write in rhyme still make
The one verse for the other's sake;
For one for sense, and one for rhyme,
I think 's sufficient at one time.”

Samuel Butler (poet) (1612–1680) poet and satirist

Canto I, line 23
Source: Hudibras, Part II (1664)

Thinking, Sense, Change, Time

“Mary: You can read?
Pocket: I was raised in a nunnery, wench. I'm a walking library of learning bound in comely leather, suitable for stroking at your service, should you fancy a bit of culture to go with your lack of breeding…or vice verse of course.”

Christopher Moore book Fool

Fool (2009)

Learning, Reading

“There are few, however, who devote thought and study to perfection of Divine service—to love, fear, communion and all of the other aspects of saintliness. It is not that they consider this knowledge unessential; if questioned each one will maintain that it is of paramount importance and that one who is not clearly versed in it cannot be deemed truly wise. Their failure to devote more attention to it stems rather from its being so manifest and so obvious to them that they see no need for spending much time upon it. Consequently, this study and the reading of works of this kind have been left to those of a not too sensitive, almost dull intelligence. These you will see immersed in the study of saintliness, not stirring from it. It has reached the stage that when one sees another engaging in saintly conduct, he cannot help but suspect him of dullwittedness.”

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto book Mesillat Yesharim

Mesillat Yesharim (1738), Introduction

Love, Fear, Intelligence, Failure

“Even in prose, the greatest writers have not often succeeded in stating simply and clearly the fact that Infinity can make itself finite or that Space can make itself bounds or that Eternity can generate time. In verse, Adam did it as easily as though he were writing any other miracle.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904)

Time

“But the form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.”

Donald Hall (1928–2018) American writer

From his essay 'Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird' in the book of the same title. 1978. ISBN 0-472-40000-2.

“When first to man the privilege was given
To hold by verse an intercourse with Heaven,
Unwilling that the immortal art should lie
Cheap, and exposed to every vulgar eye,
Great Jove, to drive away the groveling crowd,
To narrow bounds confined the glorious road,
For more exalted spirits to pursue,
And left it open to the sacred few.”
Principio quoniam magni commercia coeli Numina concessere homini, cui carmina curae, Ipse Deum genitor divinam noluit artem Omnibus expositam vulgo, immeritisque patere: Atque ideo, turbam quo longe arceret inertem, Angustam esse viam voluit, paucisque licere.

Marco Girolamo Vida (1485–1566) Italian bishop

Book III, line 358
De Arte Poetica (1527)

Lie, Art

“Verse is a set of specially related sounds, repeated aloud.”

Sidney Lanier (1842–1881) American musician, poet

Preface to The Science of English Verse 1880

“O Divine Poet, me thy Verses please
More than soft slumber laid in quiet ease.”

John Ogilby (1600–1676) Scottish academic

The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro (2nd ed. 1654), Virgil's Bucolicks

“Monotheism came to this country for the first time as the war-cry of Islamic invaders who marched in with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other. It proclaimed that there was no God but Allah and that Muhammad was the Prophet of Allah. It claimed that Allah had completed his Revelation in the Quran and that Muslims who possessed that Book were the Chosen People. It invoked a theology which called upon the believers to convert or kill the infidels, particularly the idolaters, capture their women and children and sell them into slavery and concubinage all over the world, slaughter their sages and saints and priests, break or at least desecrate their idols, destroy or convert into mosques their places of worship, plunder their properties, occupy their lands, and heap humiliations on such of them as cannot be converted or killed either due to their capacity for fighting back or the need of the conquerors for slave labour. The enormities which the votaries of Islamic Monotheism practised on a vast scale and for a long time vis-a-vis Hindu religion, culture and society, were unheard of by Hindus in the whole of their hoary history. Muslim theologians, sufis and historians who witnessed or read or heard of these doings hailed the doers as soldiers of Allah and heroes of Islam. They thanked Allah and the Prophet who had declared a permanent war on the infidels and bestowed their progeny and properties on the believers. They quoted chapter and verse from the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet in order to prove that what was being done to Hindus was fully in keeping with the highest teachings of Islam.”

Sita Ram Goel (1921–2003) Indian activist

History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)

Women, God, War, Children

“If the people at large be not already convinced that a sufficient general case has been made out for Administrative Reform, I think they never can be, and they never will be…. Ages ago a savage mode of keeping accounts on notched sticks was introduced into the Court of Exchequer, and the accounts were kept, much as Robinson Crusoe kept his calendar on the desert island. In the course of considerable revolutions of time, the celebrated Cocker was born, and died; Walkinghame, of the Tutor's Assistant, and well versed in figures, was also born, and died; a multitude of accountants, book-keepers and actuaries, were born, and died. Still official routine inclined to these notched sticks, as if they were pillars of the constitution, and still the Exchequer accounts continued to be kept on certain splints of elm wood called "tallies." In the reign of George III an inquiry was made by some revolutionary spirit, whether pens, ink, and paper, slates and pencils, being in existence, this obstinate adherence to an obsolete custom ought to be continued, and whether a change ought not to be effected.
All the red tape in the country grew redder at the bare mention of this bold and original conception, and it took till 1826 to get these sticks abolished. In 1834 it was found that there was a considerable accumulation of them; and the question then arose, what was to be done with such worn-out, worm-eaten, rotten old bits of wood? I dare say there was a vast amount of minuting, memoranduming, and despatch-boxing on this mighty subject. The sticks were housed at Westminster, and it would naturally occur to any intelligent person that nothing could be easier than to allow them to be carried away for fire-wood by the miserable people who live in that neighbourhood. However, they never had been useful, and official routine required that they never should be, and so the order went forth that they were to be privately and confidentially burnt. It came to pass that they were burnt in a stove in the House of Lords. The stove, overgorged with these preposterous sticks, set fire to the panelling; the panelling set fire to the House of Lords; the House of Lords set fire to the House of Commons; the two houses were reduced to ashes; architects were called in to build others; we are now in the second million of the cost thereof, the national pig is not nearly over the stile yet; and the little old woman, Britannia, hasn't got home to-night…. The great, broad, and true cause that our public progress is far behind our private progress, and that we are not more remarkable for our private wisdom and success in matters of business than we are for our public folly and failure, I take to be as clearly established as the sun, moon, and stars.”

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) English writer and social critic and a Journalist

"Administrative Reform" (June 27, 1855) Theatre Royal, Drury Lane Speeches Literary and Social by Charles Dickens https://books.google.com/books?id=bT5WAAAAcAAJ (1870) pp. 133-134

Wisdom, People, Books, Age

“Lincoln habitually would tell people he was totally ignorant of a subject which in fact he was quite well versed in, because then they would underestimate him, and when they underestimated him they would fall into his trap. Leonard Swett once said that anybody who mistook Lincoln for a simple man would soon end up with his back in a ditch.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Interview with Tom Mackaman (2013)

People

“This is truly how I remember the ways of the world. Those words I cursed him with make a verse, and that verse could be sung to music.”

Vālmīki Legendary Indian poet, author of the Ramayana

In. p. 7.
He remembered these words uttered in a verse form, when he got back to his hermitage. It was then that Brahma appeared before him.

World, Music, Way

“Richard Chase declares, "No great poet has written so much bad verse as Emily Dickinson." He blames the Victorian cult of little women for the fact that "two thirds of her work" is seriously flawed: "Her coy and oddly childish poems of nature and female friendship are products of a time when one of the careers open to women was perpetual childhood." Dickinson's sentimental feminine poems remain neglected by embarrassed scholars. I would maintain, however, that her poetry is a closed system of sexual reference and that the mawkish poems are designed to dovetail with those of violence and suffering.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 637

Women, Friendship, Nature, Suffering

“[Of Coleridge] His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

Letter to Wordsworth (April 26, 1816)

“There is one way, and only one, of correctly reading a Latin hexameter. There may be three or four ways of reading an English blank verse line. I venture to say that no two mortals ever read aloud any given long passage of verse with precisely the same rhythms.”

John Livingston Lowes (1867–1945) American academic

Conventions and Revolt in Poetry (1919)

Way, Reading

“Happy who in his verse can gently steer
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

The Art of Poetry, canto i, line 75.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Happiness, Light

“Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say "The world in a verse,A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,"
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

"Arrival at the Waldorf"
Parts of a World (1942)

Love, Women, Men, World

“The study of rhetoric distiguishes between tropes, or figuresvof meaning such as metaphor and metonymy, and schemes, or surface patterns of words. Poetry is a matter of trope; and verse, of scheme or design.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Study

“All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Tout ce qui n'est point prose, est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers, est prose.
Act II, sc. iv
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670)

“So many people’s school experience contains at least one instance of being looked down upon because they didn’t care for one or more of the sacred mutant outcroppings of High Modernism, and they concluded from this that Literature is all about impenetrable stuff that they don’t like. That damn Hemingway with his crazy free verse.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (1959) American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher

Oh No Lev Grossman No http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/011593.html, in Making Light (30 August 2009)]

People, School, Literature

“The world of their [the bourgeois’] predecessors was a backward, pre-technological world, a world with the good conscience of inequality and toil, in which labor was still a fated misfortune; but a world in which man and nature were not yet organized as things and instrumentalities. With its code of forms and manners. with the style and vocabulary of its literature and philosophy. this past culture expressed the rhythm and content of a universe in which valleys and forests, villages and inns, nobles and villains, salons and courts were a part of the experienced reality. In the verse and prose of this pre-technological culture is the rhythm of those who wander or ride in carriages. who have the time and the pleasure to think, contemplate, feel and narrate. It is an outdated and surpassed culture, and only dreams and childlike regressions can recapture it. But this culture is, in some of its decisive elements. also a post-technological one. Its most advanced images and positions seem to survive their absorption into administered comforts and stimuli; they continue to haunt the consciousness with the possibility of their rebirth in the consummation of technical progress. They are the expression of that free and conscious alienation from the established forms of life with which literature and the arts opposed these forms even where they adorned them. In contrast to the Marxian concept, which denotes man's relation to himself and to his work in capitalist society, the artistic alienation is the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence—a “higher level” or mediated alienation. The conflict with the world of progress, the negation of the order of business, the anti-bourgeois elements in bourgeois literature and art are neither due to the aesthetic lowliness of this order nor to romantic reaction—nostalgic consecration of a disappearing stage of civilization. “Romantic” is a term of condescending defamation which is easily applied to disparaging avant-garde positions, just as the term “decadent” far more often denounces the genuinely progressive traits of a dying culture than the real factors of decay. The traditional images of artistic alienation are indeed romantic in as much as they are in aesthetic incompatibility with the developing society. This incompatibility is the token of their truth. What they recall and preserve in memory pertains to the future: images of a gratification that would dissolve the society which suppresses it”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), pp. 59-60

Life, Fate, Pleasure, Truth

“I hung my verse in the wind
Time and tide their faults will find.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

"The Test", as quoted in Emerson As A Poet (1883) by Joel Benton, p. 40

Time

“The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the maxim, boni judicis est ampliare juris-dictionem. We shall see if they are bold enough to take the daring stride their five lawyers have lately taken. If they do, then, with the editor of our book, in his address to the public, I will say, that "against this every man should raise his voice," and more, should uplift his arm. Who wrote this admirable address? Sound, luminous, strong, not a word too much, nor one which can be changed but for the worse. That pen should go on, lay bare these wounds of our constitution, expose the decisions seriatim, and arouse, as it is able, the attention of the nation to these bold speculators on its patience. Having found, from experience, that impeachment is an impracticable thing, a mere scare-crow, they consider themselves secure for life; they sculk from responsibility to public opinion, the only remaining hold on them, under a practice first introduced into England by Lord Mansfield. An opinion is huddled up in conclave, perhaps by a majority of one, delivered as if unanimous, and with the silent acquiescence of lazy or timid associates, by a crafty chief judge, who sophisticates the law to his mind, by the turn of his own reasoning”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter http://books.google.com/books?vid=0Fz_zz_wSWAiVg9LI1&id=vvVVhCadyK4C&pg=PA192&vq=%22impeachment+is+an+impracticable+thing%22&dq=%22jeffersons+works%22 to Thomas Ritchie (25 December 1820) 1820s

Life, Books, Law, Decision

“It is part of the task of linguistics to describe texts, and all texts, including those prose or verse, which fall within any definition of literature and are accessible to analysis by the existing methods of linguistics.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1950s–1960s, The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, 1964, p. 1.

Literature, Parting

“Psalm 148 says, "Praise him,… ye waters that be above the heavens." Maybe there is still water beyond outer space. The Bible says the Lord sits on many waters. Maybe this whole thing that we see, this huge universe with all these "bazillions" of stars. Maybe the whole thing is surrounded by water. That's the only verse I've got to back up this theory. But maybe everything we see is all inside one of them little glass balls on God's dresser that you pick up and you shake once in a while and the snowflakes float around, you know.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

God, Star, Universe, Water

“Soon round us spread the hills and dales,
Where GEOFFREY spun his magic tales,
And call'd them history. The land
Whence ARTHUR sprung, and all his band
Of gallant knights. Sire of romance,
Who led the fancy's mazy dance,
Thy tales shall please, thy name still be,
When Time forgets my verse and me.”

Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) British writer

Book I The Banks of the Wye http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/bkwye10.txt (1811)

History, Time, Dance, Forgetting

“I am still making my living reciting my verses for crowds who refuse to buy my books. I must do this, as all American rhymers must, however sick I may be of the sound of my own voice.”

Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet

What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)

Books

“In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished here?”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"The Artist of the Beautiful" (1844)

“We such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"Ode for Ben Jonson".
Hesperides (1648)

Wine, Madness

“The Bards also, who by the praises of their verse transmit to distant ages the fame of heroes slain in battle, poured forth at ease their lays in abundance.”
Vos quoque qui fortes animas, belloque peremptas Laudibus in longum vates dimittitis aevum, Plurima securi fudistis carmina, Bardi.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book I, line 447 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Age, Distant

“There are ten offenses against the chanting of the holy name that prevent us from fully experiencing what is available. These ten offenses lead to the craziness that interferes and minimizes the potency of our chanting. After mangala-arati every morning, before we chant our rounds, we recite these ten offenses to remind ourselves that these offenses keep us crazy, and if we can rid ourselves of these aparadhas, we will no longer be unfortunate or unlucky. We will be able to experience this great fortune. As we examine the ten offenses, we can remind ourselves that the first words and the last words are most important. As a reminder, the first prayer of the Sri Siksastaka emphasizes the importance of congregational chanting and the very last verse of the Bhagavatam ends with the importance of harinama-sankirtana.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Sri Siksastaka Verse 2
Books, Reflections on Sacred Teachings Volume I: Sri Siksastaka (Hari-Nama Press, 2002)

“Have you ever noticed flocks of swallows flying past between the lines of certain books, whole verses of trembling, pointed swallows? One must interpret the flights of those birds…”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“Spring” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/spring01.htm His father, Books

Books, Bird, Past, Flying

“Mahari dance tradition in which the Oriya verse goes:
Pancha bhuta khiti op tejo maruta Byomo
Pancha sati nirjyasa gyani bodho Gomyo
Ahalya Draupadi Kunti Tara Mandodari totha Pancha kanya…”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Dance

“With regard to men, he must know how to stimulate ambition, how to exercise discipline with firmness, and at the same time with sufficient kindness to insure the good-will and cooperation of all. The more thoroughly he is versed in questions of economics and sociology, the better prepared will he be to meet the problems that will daily confront him. As economic production depends not only on equipment and plant, but on the psychological effect of wage systems, he must be able to discriminate in regard to which wage system is best applicable to certain classes of product.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Men, Exercises, Question, Problem

“I am an an honest man
From where the palm tree grows,
And I want, before I die,
to cast these verses from my soul.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Yo soy un hombre sincero De donde crece la palma Y antes de morirme quiero Echar mis versos del alma. I (Yo soy un hombre sincero) as translated by Esther Allen in José Martí : Selected Writings (2002), p. 273, ISBN 0142437042 Variant translations: A sincere man am I From the land where palm trees grow, And I want before I die My soul's verses to bestow. "A Sincere Man Am I" http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/46409-Jose-Marti-A-Sincere-Man-Am-I---Verse-I-, as translated by Manuel A. Tellechea, in Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses (1997) ISBN 1558852042 I am a sincere man from where the palm tree grows, and before I die I wish to pour forth the verses from my soul. Simple Verses (1891)

Soul, Tree

“I've read the scholarship that explains these verses 'in their context', and I think there's a fancy dance of evasion going on.”

Irshad Manji book The Trouble with Islam Today

Source: The Trouble with Islam Today (2005), p. 48

Thinking, Reading, Dance

“He cursed Petrarch for redacting verses to sonnets, which he said were like that tyrant's bed, where some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1711)

“Verse libertines' pioneered the work to get rid of obstacles between that which hampered the poet and separated him from his audience, less a matter of rules and formulae, more a return of spirit.”

Harriet Monroe (1860–1936) American poet and editor

The New Poetry (1918)

“In Phebus realm, in knowledge as in verse,
All things are clear, the sun of Phoebus clear,
Clear was his crystal, the Kastalian.
What you cannot clearly say, you don’t know:
To tongue of man his thought brings word:
What’s said obscurely is what’s thought obscurely.”

Esaias Tegnér (1782–1846) Swedish poet, professor and bishop

"Epilog vid Magisterpromotionen i Lund 1820".

Knowledge, Sun

“In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

Preface, p. 6
I Have Landed (2002)

Stupidity, Knowledge, Light, Universe

“I began to write what I called 'rhythms' ie unrhymed pieces with no formal metrical scheme where the rhythm was created by a kind if inner chant.. Later I was told I was writing 'free verse' or Vers libre.”

Richard Aldington (1892–1962) English writer and poet

Introduction to Collected Poems, 1929

“Arabic writing at the beginning of Islam was, therefore, not of the best quality nor of the greatest accuracy and excellence. It was not (even) of medium quality, because the Arabs possessed the savage desert attitude and were not familiar with crafts. One may compare what happened to the orthography of the Qur’an on account of this situation. The men around Muhammad wrote the Qur’an in their own script which, was not of a firmly established, good quality. Most of the letters were in contradiction to the orthography required by persons versed in the craft of writing…. Consequently, (the Qur’anic orthography of the men around Muhammad was followed and became established, and the scholars acquainted with it have called attention to passages where (this is noticeable). No attention should be paid in this connection with those incompetent (scholars) that (the men around Muhammad) knew well the art of writing and that the alleged discrepancies between their writing and the principles of orthography are not discrepancies, as has been alleged, but have a reason. For instance, they explain the addition of the alif in la ‘adhbahannahU "I shall indeed slaughter him" as indication that the slaughtering did not take place ( lA ‘adhbahannahU ). The addition of the ya in bi-ayydin "with hands (power)," they explain as an indication that the divine power is perfect. There are similar things based on nothing but purely arbitrary assumptions. The only reason that caused them to (assume such things) is their belief that (their explanations) would free the men around Muhammad from the suspicion of deficiency, in the sense that they were not able to write well. They think that good writing is perfection. Thus, they do not admit the fact that the men around Muhammad were deficient in writing.”

Ibn Khaldun book Muqaddimah

Muqqadimah, ibn Khaldun, vol. 2, p. 382
Muqaddimah (1377)

Men, Art, Thinking, Sense

“When I sit near the ocean in the morning and write my verses and breathe the salty wind which is coming from the water, I rejoice in God and I am blissful, as I was as a child.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Wenn ich morgens am Meere sitze und Verse dichte und atme dabei den salzigen Wind, der vom Wasser herüberspringt, dann gehe ich auf in Gott und bin glücklich, wie ich es nur noch in der Kinderzeit war.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

God, Water

“[It] would have been all the easier [if] the entire story of the scar had been presented as a recollection which awakens in Odysseus’ mind at this particular moment. It would have been perfectly easy to do; the story of the scar had only to be inserted two verses earlier, at the first mention of the word scar, where the motifs “Odysseus” and “recollection” were already at hand. But any such subjectivistic‐perspectivistic procedure, creating a foreground and background, resulting in the present lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.”

Erich Auerbach Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

Source: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), p. 7

Lying, Past

“[Rhyme is] but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meter; … Not without cause therefore some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rhyme, … as have also long since our best English tragedies, as… trivial and of no true musical delight; which [truly] consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Introduction to Paradise Lost Added, 1668

Age, Music, Sense, Learning

“In the emerging picture of mankind in the universe, the future (if it exists) will surely entail discoveries about space and time which will open up whole new perspectives in the relationship between mankind, mind, and the uni-verse.… But what is now? There is no such thing in physics; it is not even clear that ‘now’ could ever be described, let alone explained, in terms of physics.… Notions such as ‘the past,’ ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ seem to be more linguistic than physical.… There is no universal now, but only a personal one—a ‘here and now.’ This strongly suggests that we look to the mind, rather than to the physical world, as the origin of the division of time into past, present, and future.…There is none of this in physics.… No physical experiment has ever been performed to detect the passage of time. As soon as the objective world of reality is considered, the passage of time disappears like a ghost into the night.”

Paul Davies (1946) British physicist

Page 222, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521291514.
Space and Time in the Modern Universe (1977)

World, Reality, Universe, Time

“Many young poets, nowadays, are insured against everything. For them poetry is a game like court tennis or squash racquets — one they learned at college — and they play it with propriety, as part of their social and academic existence; their poems are occasional verse for which life itself is only one more occasion.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Recent Poetry," The Yale Review (Autumn 1955) [p. 231]
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life, Game, Learning, Parting

“As it is generally seen, blank verse seems to be only a laborious and doubtful struggle to escape from the fangs of prose… if it ever ventures to relax into simple and natural phraseology, it instantly becomes tame and the prey of its pursuer.”

Charles Symmons (1749–1826) Welsh poet

Preface to the First Edition
The Æneis (1817)

Nature

“The Bible has entered much of my work as have Latin and Greek mythology and verse.”

Dermot Healy (1947–2014) Irish writer

Penguin Group (2013) A Conversation with Dermot Healy http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/long_time_no_see.html, Penguin US, accessed May 5, 2013

“Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.”

Molière The Misanthrope

On peut être honnête homme et faire mal des vers.
Act IV, sc. i
Le Misanthrope (1666)

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Life, People, Lie, Secret

“I don’t really remember writing it [The Day I Tried To Live]. I vaguely remember the verse. It was based on a tuning that Ben Shepherd had came up with. Lyrically, it was one of those songs that I thought everyone could connect with. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is maybe a sister song to it. It’s this feeling that could come over anyone, and has probably happened to everyone. ‘Fell On Black Days’ is the feeling of waking up one day and realizing you’re not happy with your life. Nothing happened, there was no emergency, no accident, you don’t know what happened. You were happy, and one day you just aren’t, and you have to try to figure that out.
With ‘The Day I Tried To Live,’ the attitude I was trying to convey was that thing that I think everyone goes through where you wake up in the morning and you just don’t know how you are going to get through the day, and you kind of just talk yourself into it. You may go through different moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up, or wanting to just get back into bed and say f— it, but you convince yourself you’re going to do it again. And maybe this is the last time you’re going to do it, but it’s once more around.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

Interview with Entertainment Weekly, June 3, 2014 http://ew.com/article/2014/06/03/soundgarden-superunknown-spoonman-black-hole-sun-stories/, On depression and suicide

Life, Happiness, Feeling, Thinking

“I could not adopt him so I married him. You know how wonderful he is, like all Russians. He starts reciting verse at two o'clock in the morning.”

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American dancer and choreographer

Of her husband, the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, as quoted in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006) by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65.