Quotes about verse
page 3

“1 Corinthians 6:9–10 lists homosexual behavior as a sin that will bring judgment by God on the unrighteous. The beautiful truth of Christ’s gospel is found in verse 11, “And such were some of you. But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God.” Yes we should be welcoming of practicing homosexuals with the love of Christ, but with a clear presentation of His death for their sinful perversion of God-ordained sexuality between one man and one woman in Genesis 2:24. Anything less misses the meaning of what the love of God really is, not an inclusive message but a saving gospel (John 3:16). The church shouldn’t encourage people who struggle with same-sex attraction to engage in sinful sexual practices. No, church leaders like those at Highland Baptist should be finding ways to share the gospel with unbelievers and encourage Christians to live in a way that’s pleasing to God.”

Ken Ham (1951) Australian young Earth creationist

"Kentucky Baptist Church allows first 'Gay Marriage'" http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2014/07/11/kentucky-baptist-church-allows-its-first-gay-marriage/, Around the World with Ken Ham (July 11, 2014) Around the World with Ken Ham (May 2005 - Ongoing)

Love, Death, God, People

“We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

On Fredrick the Great (1842)

World, Nature

“An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty.”

William Dean Howells (1837–1920) author, critic and playwright from the United States

My Literary Passions (1895)

God, Beauty, Spring

“Every man's Free verse is different”

Edward Storer (1880–1944) British writer

Form in Free Verse ,New Republic March 1916

“Such in the Landes of our world is the poet's stance;
When he receives no wound, his treasure he'll retain.
With such deep cut mankind his heart must also lance,
To make him spill his verse, his gold tears' gushing rain!”

Théophile Gautier Le Pin des Landes

Le poète est ainsi dans les Landes du monde.
Lorsqu'il est sans blessure, il garde son trésor.
Il faut qu'il ait au cœur une entaille profonde
Pour épancher ses vers, divines larmes d'or!
"Le Pin des Landes", line 13, in Poésies Complètes (Paris: Charpentier, 1845) p. 323; Miroslav John Hanak (ed.) Romantic Poetry on the European Continent (Washington: University Press of America, 1983) vol. 1, p. 415.

World, Tear, Heart

“The basic line in any good verse is cadenced… building it around the natural breath structures of speech.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

Rothenberg and Antin interview (1958)

Nature

“Stella, think not that I by verse seek fame,
Who seek, who hope, who love, who live but thee;
Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history:
If thou praise not, all other praise is shame.”

Philip Sidney book Astrophel and Stella

Sonnet 90.
Astrophel and Stella (1591)

Love, Hope, History, Thinking

“None knows the reason why this curse
Was sent on him, this love of making verse.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry of Horace (1869), Art of Poetry, p. 191

Love

“I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book… I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.”

Maurice Cowling (1926–2005) historian

Interviewed in Naim Attallah, Singular Encounters (Quartet Books, 1990), p. 142.

Books, Understanding, Thinking, Reading

“While still in Calcutta I made my first contact with another mighty scripture, the Granth Saheb of Sri Garibdas. This Jat saint of Haryana has been the patron saint of my family ever since an ancestor of ours, who was the saint's contemporary, became his votary in the first half of the 18th century. We revere him as the Satguru (true teacher) who was an avatara of the Highest Being. He was totally illiterate but composed and sang some 18000 verses of very sublime poetry which scales the highest spiritual heights. The story goes that my ancestor would not have his first morning sip of water unless he had paid homage to the saint who lived at a distance of 4 miles from our village.”

Garib Das (1717–1778) Hindu Yogi

Goel, S. R. (2007). How I became a Hindu.

Family, Teachers, Water

“First of them all was Arnaut Daniel,
Master in love; and he his native land
Honors with the strange beauty of his verse.”

Arnaut Daniel (1150–1210) Occitan troubadour

Fra tutti il primo Arnaldo Danïello Gran maestro d'amor; ch'a la sua terra Ancor fa onor col suo dir strano e bello. Petrarch Il Trionfo d'Amore, capitolo IV, line 40; uncredited translation from petrarch.petersadlon.com http://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_trionfi.html?page=I-IV.en Criticism

Love, Beauty

“When poetry loses its ability to enchant, it shrinks into what is just an elaborate form of argumentation. When verse casts its particular spell, it becomes the most evocative form of language.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

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

“Whoever recites the first four verses of Suratul Baqarah, Ayatul Kursi (verse 255 of Suratul Baqarah) along with the two verses which follow it (verses 256 and 257 up to ‘Wa Hum Fiha Khalidun’), and the last three verses (of this same Surah) will not see any bad or sorrow in his life or his wealth; Satan will not come near him; and he will not forget the Qur’an.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Thawabul A’mal, Page 234
Shi'ite Hadith

Life, Forgetting, Wealth

“writers without books, poets without verses, painters without pictures p198”

Fernando Sabino (1923–2004) Brazilian writer

Books

“Dialectics and reflection play the same role for the philosopher as does verse for the poet.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 13

“I look upon verse as an exercise in composition.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Authors of 1951 Speaking for Themselves NY Herald Tribue 7 Oct 1951
Prose

Exercises

“People who like to display complicated technique in their verse are more given to pride themselves on their work than are those who write for their own solace.”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Einar in "Shepherds' Meet"
Sjálfstætt fólk (Independent People) (1935), Book One, Part I: Icelandic Pioneers

People

“Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most…are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so.”

James Fenton (1949) poet

Source: An Introduction to English Poetry (2002), Ch. 3: The Training of the Poet (p. 21)

Reading

“I always make the first verse well, but I have trouble making the others.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Je fais toujours bien le premier vers: mais j'ai peine à faire les autres.
'Les Précieuses Ridicules (1659), Act I, sc. xi

“I have invented [c. 1915-1916] a new series of verses, verses without words, or sound poems, in which the balancing of the vowels is gauged and distributed according to the value of the initial line... With these sound poems we should renounce language, devastated and made impossible by journalism. We should withdraw into the innermost alchemy of the word, and even surrender the word, thus conserving for poetry its most sacred domain. We should refuse to make poems second-hand; we should stop taking over words (not to mention sentences) which we did not invent entirely anew for our own use. We should no longer be content to achieve poetic effects which, in the final analysis, are but echoes of inspiration..”

Hugo Ball (1886–1927) German author, poet and one of the leading Dada artists

as quoted by Carol Rumens in her article 'Poem of the week: 'Gadji beri bimba' by Hugo Ball' https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/aug/31/hugo-ball-gadji-beri-bimba in 'The Guardian', Monday 31 August 2009 1916

Gauge

“The heroic virtues of some great men have been the cause of the corruption of eloquence, or have, at least, enervated the style of most preachers. Instead of joining with the people in rendering thanks to Heaven for the extraordinary gifts it has bestowed on those great men, these very preachers have enrolled themselves among authors and poets, and become panegyrists; they have even uttered more extravagant praises than are found in dedications, verses, or prologues; they have turned the Word of God into a whole warp of praises, which, though well deserved, are out of place, bestowed from selfish motives, not required, and ill-suited to their calling. It is fortunate indeed, if, while they are celebrating their heroes in the sanctuary, they even mention the name of that God or of that religion they ought to preach. Some have wished to preach the Gospel, which is for all men, only to one person, and have been so disconcerted when by accident that person was kept away, that they were unable to pronounce a Christian discourse before an assembly of Christian men, because it was not prepared for them, so that other orators have been obliged to take their places, who had only sufficient leisure to praise God in an extemporary exhortation.!”

Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères

Of the Pulpit (13)
Les Caractères (1688)

Men, God, People, Religion

“Then I (al- Sadiq) asked him (the thief) about his act. He said: 'perhaps, you are Ja'far b. Mohammed?' 'Yes,' I said. He said to me:'What does your noble origin avail you while you are ignorant?' 'Which verse of the Quran am I ignorant at?' I asked. He said these Words of Allah, the Great and Almighty:Whoever brings a good deed, he shall have ten like it, and whoever brings and evil deed he shall be recompensed only with the like of it.(Quran, 6:160) 'When I stole the two loaves of bread, they were two evil deeds. And When I stole the two pomegranates, they were two evil deeds, too. So these are four evil deeds. When I gave each one of them as alms, Allah has subtracted 4 evil deeds from 40 good deeds. So, I have 36 good deeds.' I (al- Sâdiq) said: 'May your mother loses you! It is you who are ignorant at the Book of Allah. Have you not heard that Allah said: (Allah) accepts-(deeds) from the pious only.(Quran, 5:27) When you stole the two loaves of bread, they were two evil deeds. And when you stole the two pomegranates, they were two evil deeds, too. And when you gave them to other than their owner without the permission of their owner, you have added four evil deeds to the four evil deeds, and you have not added four evil deeds to forty good deeds. So, he began looking at me. Then I left him and went away.”

Ja'far al-Sadiq (702–765) Muslim religious person

Tafsir

Books, Evil

“"O brother," said he, "He who is singled by
My finger (he pointed to a spirit in front)
Wrought better in the mother-tongue than I.
Whether in verses of love or prose romaunt
He surpassed all; and let the fools contend
Who make him of Limoges of more account.”

Arnaut Daniel (1150–1210) Occitan troubadour

"O frate," disse, "chesti qu'io ti cerno
col ditto," e additò un spirto innanzi,
"fu miglior fabbro del parlar materno.
Versi d'amore e prose di romanzi
soverchiò tutti; e lascia dir li stolti
che quel di Lemosì credon ch'avanzi.
Dante Purgatorio, canto 26, line 115; translation by Laurence Binyon, in Dante's Purgatorio (1938) p. 309.
Criticism

Love, Fools

“To thee of All Being /A te, de l’essere
The First Cause immense /Principio immenso,
Of matter and spirit, /Materia e spirito,
Of reason and sense /Ragione e senso;

Whilst in the full goblet /Mentre ne’ calici
Shall sparkle the wine, /Il vin scintilla
So bright the pupil /Si’come l’anima
The souls of men shine, /Ne la pupilla

Whilst earth still is smiling, /Mentre sorridono
And the sun smiles above, /La terra e il sole
And men are exchanging /E si ricambiano
Their sweet words of love, /D’amor parole

Thrills mystic of Hymen /E corre un fremito
Through high mountains course, /D’imene arcano
And broad plains are heaving /Da’ monti e palpita
With life's fertile force, /Fecondo il piano;

On thee in verse daring, /A te disfrenasi
From tight rein released, /Il verso ardito,
On thee I call, Satan, /Te invoco, o Satana
The King of the feast. /Re del convito”

Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) Italian poet and teacher

-lines 1-20 (as Printed by the Nobel Prize Library)
Hymn to Satan (1865), Inno a Satana

Love, Life, Men, Smile

“Marlowe anticipated Whitman's barbaric yawp by setting up a national PA system of blank verse – a rising iambic system of sound to suit the new success story.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), p. 223

Success

“One way of looking at poetic periods is to notice what contemporary interests and knowledge penetrate the best verse written at the time and what moods are permitted in treating of these matters.”

Kenneth Allott (1912–1973) Irish poet

Introduction Contemporary Verse, Ed Kenneth Allott, Penguin Books, London 1950

Way, Mood, Knowledge, Time

“Must I not here express my wonder that any one should exist who persuades himself that there are certain solid and indivisible particles carried along by their own impulse and weight, and that a universe so beautiful and so admirably arrayed is formed from the accidental concourse of those particles? I do not understand why the man who supposes that to have been possible should not also think that if a countless number of the forms of the one and twenty letters, whether in gold or any other material, were to be thrown somewhere, it would be possible, when they had been shaken out upon the ground, for the annals of Ennius to result from them so as to be able to be read consecutively,—a miracle of chance which I incline to think would be impossible even in the case of a single verse.”
Hic ego non mirer esse quemquam, qui sibi persuadeat corpora quaedam solida atque individua vi et gravitate ferri mundumque effici ornatissimum et pulcherrimum ex eorum corporum concursione fortuita? Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intellego, cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formae litterarum vel aureae vel qualeslibet aliquo coiciantur, posse ex is in terram excussis annales Enni, ut deinceps legi possint, effici; quod nescio an ne in uno quidem versu possit tantum valere fortuna.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, section 37
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

Beauty, Understanding, Thinking, Universe

“The point is that any piece of Impressionism, whether it be prose, verse or painting, or sculpture, is the record of the impression.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

German Chronicle, Poetry & Drama, vol. II, 1914

Painting

“In Rome much pamphleteering took the form of verses and songs, circulated orally, or of libelli, defamatory placards or broadsheets”

Moses I. Finley (1912–1986) American historian

whence our word "libel"
Source: Democracy Ancient And Modern (Second Edition) (1985), Chapter 5, Censorship in Classical Antiquity, p. 150

“Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2000s, 2001, The Enemy is not Islam. It is Nihilism (2001)

Love, Life, Death, War

“There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.”

F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet

Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914

Nature, Success

“Just breathe at the end of the line or on the punctuation. If you lose that, and lose the iambic pentameter, you'll lose all the sense of what you're saying. And if you do breathe, you'll find that Shakespeare's verse is like a surfboard.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Keith Baxter interviewed by Geoff Andrew for the British Film Institute (on the only piece of direction Welles ever gave him) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qON_f32HQDk

Sense

“Israel became a nation again in 1948. If the strange verse in Psalm 90:10 regarding the 70 or 80 years before we “fly away” ties in here, that would add up to 2018 or 2028. I’m gonna really keep an eye on Israel and that temple mount!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 102

Flying

“Gavin Douglas, set on a particular labour, with his mind full of Latin quantitative metre, attains a robuster versification than you are likely to find in Chaucer…the texture of Gavin's verse is stronger, the resilience greater.”

Gavin Douglas (1474–1522) Scottish Churchman, Scholar, Poet

Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p. 103.
About

“The heavy trouble, the bewildering care
That weighs us down who live and earn our bread,
These idle verses have no power to bear;
So let em sing of names rememberèd,
Because they, living not, can ne'er be dead,
Or long time take their memory quite away
From us poor singers of an empty day.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Apology

Memory, Singing, Time, Dead

“As Moses sought to lead his people on, he discovered that there were those among them who would occasionally become emotionally and sentimentally attached to a particular spot so that they wanted to stay there and remain stationary at that point. One day when Moses confronted this problem, he wrote in the book of Deuteronomy, the first chapter and the fifth verse: “You have been in this mountain long enough, turn ye and go on your journey, move on to the mountof the Amorite.”~ This was a message of God through Moses. And whenever God speaks he says go forward, saying in substance that you must never become bogged down in mountains and situations that will impede your progress. You must never become complacently adjusted to unobtained goals; you have been in this mountain long enough, “turn ye and take your journey."”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

"Keep Moving from this Mountain" http://www5.spelman.edu/about_us/news/pdf/70622_messenger.pdf – Founders Day Address at the Sisters Chapel, Spelman College (11 April 1960) 1960s

God, People, Books, Mountain

“O heavenly Muse, that not with fading bays
Deckest thy brow by the Heliconian spring,
But sittest crowned with stars' immortal rays
In Heaven, where legions of bright angels sing;
Inspire life in my wit, my thoughts upraise,
My verse ennoble, and forgive the thing,
If fictions light I mix with truth divine,
And fill these lines with other praise than thine.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

O Musa, tu, che di caduchi allori
Non circondi la fronte in Elicona,
Ma su nel Cielo infra i beati cori
Hai di stelle immortali aurea corona;
Tu spira al petto mio celesti ardori,
Tu rischiara il mio canto, e tu perdona
S'intesso fregj al ver, s'adorno in parte
D'altri diletti, che de' tuoi le carte.
Canto I, stanza 2 (tr. Edward Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

Life, Truth, Angels, Star

“The disposition to consider intelligence a peril is an old Anglo-Saxon inheritance. Our ancestors have celebrated this disposition in verse and prose. Splendid as our literature is, it has not voiced all the aspirations of humanity, nor could it be expected to voice an aspiration that has not characteristically belonged to the English race; the praise of intelligence is not one of its characteristic glories. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will he clever.” [Charles Kingsley, “A Farewell”] Here is the startling alternative which to the English, alone among great nations, has been not startling but a matter of course. Here is the casual assumption that a choice must be made between goodness and intelligence; that stupidity is first cousin to moral conduct, and cleverness the first step into mischief; that reason and God are not on good terms with each other; that the mind and the heart are rival buckets in the well of truth, inexorably balanced—full mind, starved heart—stout heart, weak head.”

John Erskine (1879–1951) American educator

Source: The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent (1915), p. 5

God, Truth, Stupidity, Intelligence

“There is no paradise more wondrous for any soul than to be exposed to God’s Manifestation in His Day, to hear His verses and believe in them, to attain His presence, which is naught but the presence of God, to sail upon the sea of the heavenly kingdom of His good-pleasure, and to partake of the choice fruits of the paradise of His divine Oneness.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

II, 16
The Persian Bayán

God, Pleasure, Soul, Sea

“That he had love-affairs in the provinces, too, is suggested by another of the ribald verses sung during the Gallic triumph:
Home we bring our bald whoremonger;
Romans, lock your wives away!
All the bags of gold you lent him
Went his Gallic tarts to pay.”
Ne provincialibus quidem matrimoniis abstinuisse vel hoc disticho apparet iactato aeque a militibus per Gallicum triumphum: "Urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvom adducimus. Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum."

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Ne provincialibus quidem matrimoniis abstinuisse vel hoc disticho apparet iactato aeque a militibus per Gallicum triumphum:
"Urbani, servate uxores: moechum calvom adducimus.
Aurum in Gallia effutuisti, hic sumpsisti mutuum."
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Julius Caesar, Ch. 51

Love, Home

“Rhyme is the native condition of lyric verse in English; a rhymeless lyric is a maimed thing.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Essays and Studies (1875), p. 162.

“Shakespeare is the Spinosistic deity — an omnipresent creativeness. Milton is the deity of prescience; he stands ab extra, and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in. Shakspeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the individual Shakspeare; but John Milton himself is in every line of the Paradise Lost. Shakspeare's rhymed verses are excessively condensed, — epigrams with the point every where; but in his blank dramatic verse he is diffused, with a linked sweetness long drawn out.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

Feeling, Horse

“There is nothing in the world that cannot be done by verses.”

Francesco Petrarca Il Canzoniere

Nulla al mondo è che non possano i versi.
Canzone 239, st. 5
Il Canzoniere (c. 1351–1353), To Laura in Life

World

“He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

Hope, Thinking

“If the pages of this book contain some successful verse, the reader must excuse me the discourtesy of having usurped it first. Our nothingness differs little; it is a trivial and chance circumstance that you should be the reader of these exercises and I their author.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"To the Reader" ["A quien leyere"], preface to Fervor of Buenos Aires [Fervor de Buenos Aires] (1923)

Books, Exercises, Chance, Success

“Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.”

Baldassarre Castiglione (1478–1529) Italian Renaissance author (1478-1529)

Però l'anima, aliena dai vicii, purgata dai studi della vera filosofia, versata nella vita spirituale ed esercitata nelle cose dell'intelletto, rivolgendosi alla contemplazion della sua propria sustanzia, quasi da profundissimo sonno risvegliata, apre quegli occhi che tutti hanno e pochi adoprano, e vede in se stessa un raggio di quel lume che è la vera imagine della bellezza angelica a lei communicata, della quale essa poi communica al corpo una debil umbra.
Bk. 4, ch. 68; p. 300.
Souced, Il Libro del Cortegiano (1528)

Life, Beauty, Angels, Soul

“Still haunted by Haiku, and tried my hand at it, but I fall pitifully short of the Wordsworthian touch. But failure in this realm turned my mind to an old enthusiasm of mine, the Welsh englyn. This verse form was derived by the Welsh from the inscriptions which their Roman conquerors put on tombs … A good englym must have four lines, of ten, then six, syllables, the last two lines having seven syllables each. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last two lines must rhyme with the first rhyme in the first line, but the third or fourth line must rhyme on a weak syllable. Got that?”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Haiku and Englyn" in The Toronto Daily Star (4 April 1959), republished in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) edited by Judith Skelton Grant, p. 241.

Failure

“It might come as a surprise to many, but the truth is that Islam today no longer has a living and evolving theology. In fact, with few exceptions, Islam’s last genuine theologians belong to the early part of the 19th century. Go to any mosque anywhere, whether it is in New York or Mecca, and you are more likely to hear a political sermon rather than a theological reflection. In the highly politicized version of Islam promoted by Da’esh, al Qaeda, the Khomeinists in Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Boko Haram in Nigeria, God plays a cameo role at best. Deprived of its theological moorings, today’s Islam is a wayward vessel under the captaincy of ambitious adventurers leading it into sectarian feuds, wars and terrorism. Many, especially Muslims in Europe and North America, use it as a shibboleth defining identity and even ethnicity. A glance at Islam’s history in the past 200 years highlights the rapid fading of theologians. Today, Western scholars speak of Wahhabism as if that meant a theological school. In truth, Muhammad Abdul-Wahhabi was a political figure. His supposedly theological writings consist of nine pages denouncing worship at shrines of saints. Nineteenth-century “reformers” such as Jamaleddin Assadabadi and Rashid Rada were also more interested in politics than theology. The late Ayatollah Khomeini, sometimes regarded as a theologian, was in fact a politician wearing clerical costume. His grandson has collected more than 100,000 pages of his writings and speeches and poetry. Of these, only 11 pages, commenting on the first and shortest verse of the Koran, could be regarded as dabbling in theology, albeit not with great success.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"The mad dream of a dead empire that unites Islamic rebels" http://nypost.com/2014/06/14/the-mad-dream-of-a-dead-empire-that-unites-islamic-rebels/, New York Post (June 14, 2014). New York Post

God, War, Truth, School

“Take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Letter to Robert Bridges (25 October 1879 )
Letters, etc

Reading

“I dream I am the chosen Poet,
Who knows all there is to know on Earth,
The one whose inspiration’s pure and perfect,
And captures infinity in a verse!I dream a verse of mine has all the brightness
To light the whole world! And it will please
Even those who long and die of sadness!
And even wise, unhappy souls it will appease.”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Sonho que sou a Poetisa eleita,
Aquela que diz tudo e tudo sabe,
Que tem a inspiração pura e perfeita,
Que reúne num verso a imensidade!Sonho que um verso meu tem claridade
Para encher todo o mundo! E que deleita
Mesmo aqueles que morrem de saudade!
Mesmo os de alma profunda e insatisfeita!
Quoted in Trocando olhares (1994), p. 131
Translated by John D. Godinho
Book of Sorrows (1919), "Vaidade"

World, Sadness, Dreams, Soul

“Composed for renown am I, a verse heard
four times over in the four-quartered fort
in the song of the cauldron when first it gave voice,
warmed by the breath of nine maidens.
The Chief of Annwn's cauldron, who finished
the rim around its edge with pearl,
swore never should it cook a coward's food?
A bright flashing sword was raised to it
and it was left in the hand of Llenlleawc
and lanterns shone before Hell's mouth's door
and when we went in with Arthur trouble glittered:
Save for seven none came up from Fort Mead-mad.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Spoils of Annwn

Food, Hell, Time, Madness

“Of all my verse, like not a single line;
But like my title, for it is not mine.
That title from a better man I stole:
Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Title page poem
Underwoods (1887)

“Yes, the work comes out more fair,
From a form that rebels against
Handling,
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.”

Théophile Gautier (1811–1872) French writer

Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle
D'une forme au travail
Rebelle,
Vers, marbre, onyx, émail.
"L'Art", line 1, in Émaux et Camées (1852; Genève: Librairie Droz, 1947) p. 130; Earl Jeffrey Richards (ed.) Christine de Pizan and Medieval French Lyric (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) p. 32.

“Several dozen journals now exist that print only verse. They don't publish literary reviews, just page after page of freshly minted poems. The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines' contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind — journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

Essays, Can Poetry Matter? (1991)

Love, People, Effort, Reading

“Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Can Grande's Castle (1921), preface.

“The history of humorous writing discloses everchanging trends. Our fast-paced modern living is too impatient for the lengthy light verse and the leisurely essays of our forefathers.”

Evan Esar (1899–1995) American writer

Humorous English, p266

History, Light

“For something like forty years I've been getting various sorts of narratives off my chest without being able to hit upon a classification for them. There's something dreary to me about the publisher's arbitrary division of every word written for publication into fiction and nonfiction. My writing has a most irritating way of being difficult to classify in either category. At times I would find it hard to tell you whether the stuff is prose or verse. Gradually I've come up with the tag: contemporary chronicle.”

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, painter

Presentation at Carleton College, Nov 30 1960

Way, Time

“Monckton Milnes was a social power in London, and of course he himself affected social eccentricity, challenging ridicule with the indifference of one who knew himself to be the first wit in London, and a maker of men — of a great many men. A word from him went far. An invitation to his breakfast-table went farther. Behind his almost Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus, he carried a fine, broad, and high intelligence which no one questioned. As a young man he had written verses, which some readers thought poetry, and which were certainly not altogether prose. Later, in Parliament he made speeches, chiefly criticised as too good for the place and too high for the audience. Socially, he was one of two or three men who went everywhere, knew everybody, talked of everything.”

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

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Men, Intelligence, Question, Indifference

“In the history of versification did anyone ever juggle so wildly well with iambics, sapphics, dactylics, anapestics, and all the rest? He fabricated verses most ingeniously, most enthusiastically. His virtuosity is amazing. Almost every line he wrote was a tour de force. And in spite of all this highly self-conscious technical facility he managed occasionally to write poetry.”

Ausonius (310–395) poet

Edward Townsend Booth, God Made the Country (1946), p. 37.
Criticism

History

“Blank verse really deserving the name I believe to be impossible except to one or two eminent writers in a generation.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Preface to The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), p. ix

“Despise me not
And not be queasy
To praise somewhat
Verse is not easy”

J. V. Cunningham (1911–1985) American writer

'For my Contemporaries' from - The Helmsman 1942
Epigrams

“I've never written for a fasting man;
A taste of wine is good before my verse.
But sleep is better than a little wine,
For when sleeping one thinks my songs are dreams.”
Jejunis nil scribo: meum post pocula si quis legerit, hic sapiet. Sed magis hic sapiet, si dormiet: et putet ista somnia missa sibi.

Ausonius (310–395) poet

Jejunis nil scribo: meum post pocula si quis
legerit, hic sapiet.
Sed magis hic sapiet, si dormiet: et putet ista
somnia missa sibi.
"De Bissula", line 13; translation from Harold Isbell (trans.) The Last Poets of Imperial Rome (1971) p. 48.

Dreams, Thinking, Sleep, Wine

“Come, take hands, you are not such
As this will weary overmuch.
Sit we down, and hear rehearse
The marvels of the sweet-souled verse”

Edward Andrade (1887–1971) English physicist

Poem With a copy of "The Faithful Shepherdess"

Soul

“In Daniel 7, Daniel had a vision where “the four winds of the heavens strove upon the great sea. And four beasts came up from the sea, diverse one from another” (vv. 2-3). In the vision, Daniel saw a lion with eagle’s wings, a bear with three ribs in its mouth, a leopard with four wings, and a terrible beast with iron teeth and ten horns (v. 7). Bible scholars have speculated on the meaning of this passage for centuries. Some think the four beasts in this chapter represent a rehash of the first four empires from Babylon to the Roman Empire; while others think it is all yet in the future. I’m no scholar but here is my opinion: I (and many Bible scholars) think the four beasts are four world powers that will “strive” for world power (domination?) at the end of time before the one with ten horns finally becomes dominant. I think the four beasts are interpreted as follows: The lion sometimes standing like a man with eagle’s wings (v. 4) represents England (whose symbol as always been the lion) and America (whose symbol is the eagle) united, as one of four major end-time powers. The eagle’s wings “were plucked” and “it was lifted up from the earth, and made to stand upon the feet as a man, and a man’s heart was given to it” (v. 4). My best guess is that America will soon cease to be a world power (wings plucked) but there will still be enough of a godly influence that the English/American alliance will have some “heart” or compassion and maybe even be able to finally “take a stand” for God in the wicked world. I think the bear (v. 5) is Russia (whose symbol is the bear) and the three ribs in its mouth represent three countries it has dominated or “eaten,” such as Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, or perhaps Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia. The leopard with four wings (v. 6) could be some sort of oriental alliance between China, Japan, Korea, and a Southeast Asia alliance (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, etc.). Verse 6 says, “dominion was given to it.” Many certainly feel that China is soon to be the major economic (and military) power in the world. If they could get a military or economic alliance with some of the other oriental nations mentioned, they would indeed be a force to be reckoned with! No animal is named for the fourth beast. It is only described as being dreadful, terrible, strong exceedingly, having great iron teeth, different from all other beasts and having ten horns. As I said earlier there are three options from what I can see for this beast. It is either (A) the European Common Market or a future similar alliance; or (B) 10 world regions and (C) some sort of alliance of Muslim nations around the Middle East or the world. I tend to go with option (C)”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 94-95

God, World, Feeling, Thinking

“If we want to be honest, we can ship the Statue of Liberty back to France or replace the outdated verse with new lines, "America the closed preserve/ That dirty foreigners don't deserve."”

David D. Friedman book The Machinery of Freedom

Source: The Machinery of Freedom, 1973, p.71

“Paul Valéry insists on the inescapable commitment of the poetic language to the negation. The verses of this language “ne parlent jamais que de choses absentes.” They speak of that which, though absent, haunts the established universe of discourse and behavior as its most tabooed possibility—neither heaven nor hell, neither good nor evil but simply “le bonheur.””

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 67

Behavior, Hell, Universe, Evil

“A few months before the murder [of Domitian] a raven perched on the Capitol and croaked out the words: "All will be well!" – a portent which some wag explained in the following verse:
There was a raven, strange to tell,
Perched upon Jove's own gable, whence
He tried to tell us "All is well!" –
But had to use the future tense.”
Ante paucos quam occideretur menses cornix in Capitolino elocuta est: εσται πάντα καλως, nec defuit qui ostentum sic interpretaretur: Nuper Tarpeio quae sedit culmine cornix, "Est bene" non potuit dicere, dixit: "Erit."

Sueton book The Twelve Caesars

Ante paucos quam occideretur menses cornix in Capitolino elocuta est: εσται πάντα καλως, nec defuit qui ostentum sic interpretaretur:
Nuper Tarpeio quae sedit culmine cornix,
"Est bene" non potuit dicere, dixit: "Erit."
Source: The Twelve Caesars, Domitian, Ch. 23

Future

“He would have died of loneliness and other things if the divine Omnipotence had not called him whenever It had the chance and invited him to become one with the radiant glory of heaven and earth. He tried whenever the opportunity occurred to obey this call and allow his soul to become one with a higher world beyond this world. He did not compose poetry openly now—his first experience at that had taught him a lesson; he resolved not to compose poetry openly until he was grown up and living among good and high-minded men, whom he imagined must exist elsewhere. But that did not stop him composing poetry; he composed just for himself now. Sometimes he scratched out a whole verse on the ice. He committed to memory every scrap of poetry he heard, and absorbed everything to do with knowledge, and was determined to write it all down in books later on—you see, he had the idea that there were too few books in the world, and that somewhere in the world there were people waiting impatiently, hungry for more books to be written.</b”

Halldór Laxness (1902–1998) Icelandic author

Heimsljós (World Light) (1940), Book One: The Revelation of the Deity

Men, People, Books, World

“They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes, 'more than the pen can enumerate'… In short, the Muhammadan army brought the country to utter ruin, and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants, and plundered the cities, and captured their offspring, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was one called Somnat, fixed upon stone, polished like a mirror of charming shape and admirable workmanship' Its head was adorned with a crown set with gold and rubies and pearls and other precious stones' and a necklace of large shining pearls, like the belt of Orion, depended from the shoulder towards the side of the body….
'The Muhammadan soldiers plundered all these jewels and rapidly set themselves to demolish the idol. The surviving infidels were deeply affected with grief, and they engaged 'to pay a thousand pieces of gold' as ransom for the idol, but they were indignantly rejected, and the idol was destroyed, and 'its limbs, which were anointed with ambergris and perfumed, were cut off. The fragments were conveyed to Delhi, and the entrance of the Jami' Masjid was paved with them, that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory.' Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds. Amen! After some time, among the ruins of the temples, a most beautiful jasper-coloured stone was discovered, on which one of the merchants had designed some beautiful figures of fighting men and other ornamental figures of globes, lamps, etc., and on the margin of it were sculptured verses from the Kurdn. This stone was sent as an offering to the shrine of the pole of saints… At that time they were building a lofty octagonal dome to the tomb. The stone was placed at the right of the entrance. "At this time, that is, in the year 707 h. (1307 a. d.), 'Alau-d din is the acknowledged Sultan of this country. On all its borders there are infidels, whom it is his duty to attack in the prosecution of a holy war, and return laden with countless booty."”

Alauddin Khalji (1266–1316) Ruler of the Khalji dynasty

Somnath. Abdu’llah ibn Fazlu’llah of Shiraz (Wassaf) : Tarikh-i-Wassaf (Tazjiyatu’l Amsar Wa Tajriyatu’l Ãsar), in Elliot and Dowson, Vol. III : Elliot and Dowson, History of India as told by its own Historians, 8 Volumes, Allahabad Reprint, 1964. pp. 43-44. Also quoted in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts.
Quotes from The History of India as told by its own Historians

Men, God, War, Children

“I tend to write in patterned arrangement with rhymes.. I try to secure an effect of flowing continuity and the correspondence between verse and music.”

Marianne Moore (1887–1972) American poet and writer

Oxford Anthology of American Literature 1938
Prose

Music

“What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,… who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. …rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

People, Law, Drink, Passion

“Both in verse and in prose [Karl] Shapiro loves, partly out of indignation and partly out of sheer mischievousness, to tell the naked truths or half-truths or quarter-truths that will make anybody’s hair stand on end; he is always crying: “But he hasn’t any clothes on!” about an emperor who is half the time surprisingly well-dressed.”

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

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, p. 331
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Love, Truth, Time, Cry

“No one can be a true mystic who is not thoroughly versed in the ways of nature. The more nature is attracted by spiritual favors, the more it is inclined to make itself the master of them. Nature always mingles its own spirit with the spirit of God. unless we keep a close watch over it, it will always remain so. Natures most subtle snare is to lead us to confuse what is licit with what is expedient. When we doubt the inspiration of an impulse, whether from grace or nature, we should picture a similar object which is without doubt acceptable to nature. If this representation pleases us, it is a sign that the first inclination also comes from nature and is consequently to be rejected.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

God, Way, Nature

“No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.”

Alfred Austin (1835–1913) British writer and poet

Prose Papers on Poetry (1910)

“I have found power in the mysteries of thought,
exaltation in the changing of the Muses;
I have been versed in the reasonings of men;
but Fate is stronger than anything I have known.”

Euripidés Alcestis

Source: Alcestis (438 BC), l. 962

Men, Fate, Change

“the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poet with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted: I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worth while to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood, if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys, as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)

https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/10/mode/1up p. 10

Books, Boy, Nature, Thinking

“""… Why Nimrod? Why that name?""
Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. ""I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth… And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-""
""Babel?""
""It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'""
""But God struck them down when they built the tower.""
""Yes. But why? 11, 6. 'Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'""
""Wow,"" Thandie said. ""You're challenging God?""
""Why the hell not?""”

Stephen Baxter (1957) author

Source: Flood (2008), Chapter 90

God, Fear, School, Imagination

“Haven't read Koran so couldn't quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/307369895031603200 (28 February 2013) Twitter

Quotes, Evil, Reading

“Come, let us hasten to a higher plane
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n
Commingled in an endless Markov chain! I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part. Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.<p”

Stanisław Lem book The Cyberiad

Love and Tensor Algebra, St. 1, 4, 6, in "The First Sally (A): or, Trurl's Electronic Bard"
The Cyberiad (1967)

Love, Heart, Parting

“At bottom, it is the Poet's first gift, as it is all men's, that he have intellect enough. He will be a Poet if he have: a Poet in word; or failing that, perhaps still better, a Poet in act. Whether he write at all; and if so, whether in prose or in verse, will depend on accidents: who knows on what extremely trivial accidents, — perhaps on his having had a singing-master, on his being taught to sing in his boyhood! But the faculty which enables him to discern the inner heart of things, and the harmony that dwells there (for whatsoever exists has a harmony in the heart of it, or it would not hold together and exist), is not the result of habits or accidents, but the gift of Nature herself; the primary outfit for a Heroic Man in what sort soever. To the Poet, as to every other, we say first of all, See. If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each other, and name yourself a Poet; there is no hope for you. If you can, there is, in prose or verse, in action or speculation, all manner of hope. The crabbed old Schoolmaster used to ask, when they brought him a new pupil, 'But are ye sure he's not a dunce?”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Why, really one might ask the same thing, in regard to every man proposed for whatsoever function; and consider it as the one inquiry needful: Are ye sure he's.
1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Poet

Men, Hope, Nature, Singing

“The Sultan is not slack in jihad. He never lets go of his spear or bridle in pursuing jihad by land and sea routes. This is his main occupation which engages his eyes and ears. He has spent vast sums for the establishment of the faith and the spread of Islam in these lands, as a result of which the light of Islam has reached the inhabitants and the flash of the true faith brightened among them. Fire temples have been destroyed and the images and idols of Budd have been broken, and the lands have been freed from those who were not included in the darul Islam, that is, those who had refused to become zimmis. Islam has been spread by him in the far east and has reached the point of sunrise. In the words of Abu Nasr al-Aini, he has carried the flags of the followers of Islam where they had never reached before and where no chapter or verse (of the Quran) had ever been recited. Thereafter he got mosques and places of worship erected, and music replaced by call to prayers (azan), and the incantations of fire-worshippers stopped by recitations of the Quran. He directed the people of Islam towards the citadels of the infidels and, by the grace of Allah, made them (the believers) inheritors of wealth and land and that country which they (the believers) had never trodden upon.”

Muhammad bin Tughluq (1290–1351) Turkic Sultan of Delhi

Tughlaq Kalina Bharata, Persian texts translated into Hindi by S.A.A. Rizvi, 2 Volumes, Aligarh, 1956-57. p. 325 ff. Vol I. (Shihabuddin Al Umari.) Also quoted (using a different translation) in Jain, Meenakshi (2011). The India they saw: Foreign accounts. 8th to 15th Centuries, p. 274.

People, Faith, Music, Light

“The verse adorn again
Fierce War, and faithful Love,
And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction drest.”

Thomas Gray The Bard

III. 3. lines 125-127
The Bard (1757)

Love, War, Truth, Faith

“To win, beloved Caroline from thee,
One thought, in years when we shall sever'd be--
--Sever'd, perchance, by those deep waves, which pour
Their billowy murmurs round our native shore,--
For this, I wander'd round the Bow'rs of Song,
A weary, and rejected suppliant long,
And of the Muses crav'd in humblest tone
From their rich wreaths, one simple bud alone:
They did but fling their wildest weeds at me,
And thus I twin'd them into verse for thee!”

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) Poet, cook

To Caroline (1826)

“As a kid, I was unquestionably a nerd, but it wasn't really a culture you could opt into or out of. It was just sort of something you were or were not. As far as today, I'm certainly friendly to that world, with my affinities, but I would probably get kicked out of the national convention for being a bit of a poser. I'm not as well-versed in many of the worlds that I'd need to be a bona fide card-carrying geek these days.”

Doug Dorst writer

Vulture interview (2014)

World

“Verse sweetens toil, however rude the sound;
She feels no biting pang the while she sings;
Nor, as she turns the giddy wheel around,
Revolves the sad vicissitudes of things.”

Richard Gifford

Contemplation. Compare: "The sad vicissitude of things", Laurence Sterne, Sermon xvi.

Sadness, Feeling, Singing

“When the generation that has known war is still alive, it is well that they should be given chapter and verse with regard to some of the best-known cries, catchwords, and exhortations by which they were so greatly influenced. As a warning, therefore, this collection is made. It constitutes only the exposure of a few samples. To cover the whole ground would be impossible.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction

War

Ismail ibn Musa Menk (1975) Muslim cleric and Grand Mufti of Zimbabwe.

and may Allah bless you and grant you success in these examinations – but even in the Akhirah we ask Allah to bless you, to open your doors. To prepare for the Akhirah, it's not an easy task, but with the hope in the mercy of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala things will be made easy, and at the same time, with the constant preparation, without giving up hope – never ever giving up, never saying no, never just throwing the towel – by the will of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala we will achieve, and we will achieve great heights. "Exams in Life - Never Give Up - Mufti Menk" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4w4pak66V0, YouTube (2013) Lectures

Life, Death, Happiness, People

“Spring 1989 will always remain as a kind of watershed in intellectual and world history. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa on Salman Rushdie. Immediately following in its wake came short interviews with or articles by Western intellectuals, Arabists, and Islamologists blaming Rushdie for bringing the barbarous sentence onto himself by writing the Satanic Verses. John Esposito, an American expert on Islam, claimed he knew “of no Western scholar of Islam who would not have predicted that [Rushdie’s] kind of statements would be explosive.” That is sheer hypocrisy coming from a man who has published extracts from Sadiq al-Azm’s previously quoted book, that had also dared to criticize Islam.”

Ibn Warraq (1946) Pakistani writer

Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim, Chapter 1
Why I am not a Muslim

Books, World, Quotes, History

“But in the glances of his eye,
A penetrating, keen, and sly
Expression found its home;
The flash of that satiric rage,
Which, bursting on the early stage,
Branded the vices of the age,
And broke the keys of Rome.
* * *
Still is thy name in high account,
And still thy verse has charms,
Sir David Lindesay of the Mount,
Lord Lion King-at-arms!”

David Lindsay (1490–1554) Scottish noble and poet

Sir Walter Scott Marmion (1808) Canto 4, st. 7.
Criticism

Age, Home, Rage

“"But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness." -Romans iv. 5. The following things may be noted in this verse:… That justification respects a man as ungodly. This is evident by these words,—that justifieth the ungodly; which cannot imply less, than that God, in the act of justification, has no regard to any thing in the person justified, as godliness, or any goodness in him; but that immediately before this act, God beholds him only as an ungodly creature…”

Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) Christian preacher, philosopher, and theologian

Justification By Faith Alone (1738)

God, Faith, Personality

“I swear by the most holy Essence of God — exalted and glorified be He — that in the Day of the appearance of Him Whom God shall make manifest a thousand perusals of the Bayán cannot equal the perusal of a single verse to be revealed by Him Whom God shall make manifest.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

V, 8
The Persian Bayán

God, Appearance

“Good free verse is not at all easy to write, for there is no repetitive beat to lull the reader's critical faculty, much pattern and discipline is to be found in it, though the pattern of sounds and choice of exact words, gives it its beauty.”

Marjorie Boulton (1924–2017) British writer

Anatomy of Poetry (1953)

Beauty

“I am reading Jonson's verses to the memory of Shakespeare; an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric…”

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

On "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us” by Ben Jonson, in Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry (1692 - 1697) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2615

Memory, Reading

“Central also to reading verse aloud is the handling of enjambment,.. the interplay of line-end and sentence-flow.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Reading

“The absolute morality that a religious person might profess would include what, stoning people for adultery, death for apostasy, punishment for breaking the Sabbath. These are all things which are religiously based absolute moralities. I don’t think I want an absolute morality. I think I want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed and based upon, I’d almost say, intelligent design [pun intended]. Can we not design our society, which has the sort of morality, the sort of society that we want to live in – if you actually look at the moralities that are accepted among modern people, among 21st century people, we don’t believe in slavery anymore. We believe in equality of women. We believe in being gentle. We believe in being kind to animals. These are all things which are entirely recent. They have very little basis in Biblical or Quranic scripture. They are things that have developed over historical time through a consensus of reasoning, of sober discussion, argument, legal theory, political and moral philosophy. These do not come from religion. To the extent that you can find the good bits in religious scriptures, you have to cherry pick. You search your way through the Bible or the Quran and you find the occasional verse that is an acceptable profession of morality and you say, ‘Look at that. That’s religion,’ and you leave out all the horrible bits and you say, ‘Oh, we don’t believe that anymore. We’ve grown out of that.’ Well, of course we’ve grown out it. We’ve grown out of it because of secular moral philosophy and rational discussion.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

Richard Dawkins-George Pell Q&A (2012)

Death, Women, People, Religion