The all-new quote thread

[Saturn]

Thank you Malia

[Saturn]

I
Oppressed with grief, oppressed with care,
A burden more than I can bear,
I set me down and sigh;
Oh life! thou art a galling load,
Along a rough, a weary road
To wretches such as I!
Dim-backward as I cast my view,
What sickening scenes appear –
What sorrows yet may pierce me through,
Too justly I may fear!
Still caring, despairing,
Must be my bitter doom;
My woes here shall close ne’er
But with the closing tomb!

II
Happy ye sons of busy life
Who, equal to the bustling strife,
No other view regard
(Even when the wished end’s denied,
Yet while the busy means are plied,
They bring their own reward);
Whilst, I, a hope-abandoned wight,
Unfitted with an aim,
Meet every sad returning night
And joyless morn the same.
You, bustling and justling,
Forget each grief and pain;
I, listless yet restless,
Find every prospect vain!
Robert Burns, Despondency, An Ode, 1-28.

[Saturn]

Some Sappho for you. Short, but sweet little epigrams:

Without warning

As a whirlwind
swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
No. 44

Now I know why Eros,

Of all the progeny of
Earth and Heaven, has
been most dearly loved
No. 48

With his venom

Irresistible
and bittersweet

that loosener
of limbs, Love

reptile-like
strikes me down
No. 53

The nightengale’s

The soft-spoken
announcer of
Spring’s presence
No. 62

Tonight I’ve watched

The moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone
No. 64

Rich as you are

Death will finish
you: afterwards no
one will remember

or want you: you
had no share in
the Pierian roses

You will flitter
invisible among
the indistinct dead
in Hell’s palace
darting fitfully
No. 82

Experience shows us

Wealth unchaperoned
by Virtue is never
an innocuous neighbor
No. 86

We know this much

Death is an evil;
we have the gods’
word for it; they too
would die if death
were a good thing
No. 87

[Saturn]

“Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,
That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine:
Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertaine:
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn’d braine.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay,
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blowes,
And others’ feete still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes,
Biting my trewand pen, beating my selfe for spite,
Foole, said my Muse to me, looke in thy heart and write.”
Sir Phillip Sidney, from Astrophil and Stella

[dks]

You always happen to quote things I've just finished reading, Saturn...it's rather uncanny, so it is.

I love Astrophil and Stella--I mean how many can write that many sonnets about the facial features and characteristics of one woman?

Here's my local, wacky dentist's billboard chunk of wisdom:

"There will be prayer is schools as long as tests are given."



I love that guy...

[Saturn]

Here's my local, wacky dentist's billboard chunk of wisdom:

"There will be prayer is schools as long as tests are given."



I love that guy...

Is that not supposed to say 'in' or have I missed the joke?

[Saturn]

“Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
To morrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he’s a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
And neerer he’s to Setting.

That Age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.”
Robert Herrick, from To the Virgins, to make much of Time, stanzas 1-3

[Saturn]

“Why is’t so difficult to see
Two bodyes and one minde?
And why are those who else agree
So differently kind?
Hath nature such fantastique art,
That she can vary every heart?

Why are the bands of friendship tyed
With so remisse a knot,
That by the most it is defyed,
And by the rest forgot?
Why do we step with so slight sense
From friendship to indifference?
If friendship sympathy impart,
Why this illshuffled game,
That heart can never met with heart,
Or flame encounter flame?
What doth this crueltie create?
Is it th’intrigue of love or fate?”
Katheraine Philips, from The Enquiry, stanzas 5-7.

[Saturn]

So many good quotes here its worth reading them all.

“…what a pupil learns from a teacher – a true teacher, that is, an inspirer, an instigator, one who, in the literal sense, educates, ‘draws out’ – cannot be quantified by volume or weight. It can only be absorbed through a kind of osmosis, sometimes known, sometimes unrecognized, whose unpredictable effects may show themselves, transfigured, in the passage of time.”

“The real mother of poetry may well be political freedom, the most vital condition for the poetic genius to flourish. True literature cannot prosper in a country where there is subjugation and bondage – by true literature I mean that which enters the life of the public, stimulating and inspiring as it goes.”

“The poet stands above his surroundings, looking wistfully towards the radiance of the distant stars and making ready to open up his soul…"

"…The poet lives in the ideal world and works for the real world.”

“In the end isolation from the world harms the artist. He accustoms himself to certain forms and mannerisms until he becomes an eccentric, a dreamer. For a while he may feel at his ease.”
Robert Schumann.


Not a poet or famous writer but a composer.

[Saturn]

“Friendship should be more than biting Time should sever.”

“…real friendship once ended, cannot be mended.”
TS Eliot, Murder In The Cathedral

“It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age. My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered.”
Byron


“Cancel, Catullus, the expectancies of friendship
cancel the kindness deemed to accrue there:
kindness is barren, friendship breeds nothing,
only the weight of past deeds growing oppressive
as Catullus has discovered, bitter & troubled,
in one he had once accounted a unique friend.”
Catullus, No. LXIII.

“…I have no friend in the world.
Let them come and kill me
If they hate me so, to kill me would be kindness;
Life is all pain to me; I want to die.

…The afflicted found a friend;
He that was mine,
Is lost, and I have no other.”
Sophocles, Electra

“Few are my years, and yet I feel
The world was ne’er design’d for me:
Ah! Why do dark’ning shades conceal
The hour when man must cease to be?
Once I beheld a splendid dream,
A visionary scene of bliss:
Truth!—wherefore did thy hated beam
Awake me to a world like this?

I loved—but those I loved are gone;
Had friends—my early friends are fled:
How cheerless feels the heart alone
When all its former hopes are dead!…
Byron, From ‘I would I Were a Careless Child.’

“…friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

“I am—yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:—
I am the self-consumer of my woes;—
They rise and vanish in oblivion’s host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes:—
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,—
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange—nay, rather stranger than the rest.”
John Clare, from ‘I am’

“…no one is free
from faults; the best is the man who is hampered by the smallest.
A kindly friend will weigh, as is fair, my virtues against my failings,
and if he wants my affections he will come down on the side
of my virtues as being more numerous(if in fact they are more numerous!).
On that principle he will be weighed in the same scales.
If you expect your friend to put up with your boils
you’ll forget about his warts. It’s fair that anyone who asks
indulgence for his faults should grant the same in return.”
Horace, Satires, III, 67-75.

“Left in the world alone
Where nothing seems my own
And everything is weariness to me
‘Tis life without an end
‘Tis a world without a friend
And everything is sorrowful I see”
John Clare.


“‘I agree with you,’ replied the stranger, ‘in believing that friendship is not only a desirable, but a possible acquisition. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I­­­­­—I have lost everything, and, and cannot begin life anew.”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

"So I too
was abandoned by some of my friends – not out of hatred,
but because they were scared stiff.
They had no lack of loyalty, or the will to duty:
they just dreaded hostile gods.
You can say they’re timid, say they’re over-cautious,
but they don’t deserve to be called bad –
or is it that my good-heartedness excuses much-cherished
friends, sees their good side, absolves them from blame?
Let this indulgence suffice them – the right to remain silent
about how my witness, too, excused their act.
But you few are a nobler group, who held it shameful
to offer me no aid in my distress,
and my gratitude for you kindness will only perish
when my body’s reduced to ash –"
Ovid, Black Sea Letters.

[AhDistinctly]

Horace -- Staires?

[Saturn]

Edited.

Sorry, that was not written in the best frame of mind at all.

[Saturn]

“Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not ‘seems’.
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and suits of woe.”
Hamlet, I, ii 76-86

[Saturn]

“There have been
(Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’ arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic’d in ‘s absence,
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbor—by
Sir Smile, his neighbor. Nay, there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for’t there’s none.
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where ‘tis predominte; and ‘tis pow’rful—think it—
From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know’t,
It will let in and out the enemy,
With bag and baggage. Many thousands on’s
Have the disease, and feel’t not.”
The Winter’s Tale, I, ii, 190-207

[Saturn]

“There have been
(Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th’ arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic’d in ‘s absence,
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbor —by
Sir Smile, his neighbor. Nay, there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for’t there’s none.
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where ‘tis predominte; and ‘tis pow’rful—think it—
From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know’t,
It will let in and out the enemy,
With bag and baggage. Many thousands on’s
Have the disease, and feel’t not.”
The Winter’s Tale, I, ii, 190-207