Saturday, September 03, 2011

Quotation Saturday

POETRY ~

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.
~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle, On Poetics
 
Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.
~John Keats

PHILOSOPHY ~

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is metaphysics.
~Voltaire
 
My definition [of a philosopher] is of a man up in a balloon, with his family and friends holding the ropes which confine him to earth and trying to haul him down.
~Louisa May Alcott
 
Upon the whole, I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see.
~George Berkeley

Being a philosopher, I have a problem for every solution.
~Robert Zend

HAPPINESS ~
 
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
~Robertson Davies

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
~James Openheim

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
~Margaret Young

Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants, and to serve them one's self?
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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