Great Throughts Treasury

"Without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating. " - Pearl S. Buck, fully Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, also known by her Chinese name Sai Zhenzhu

"The most moving thing in a speech is always the logic. It is never flowery and flourishes. It is not sentimental exhortation; it is never the faux poetry we're all subjected to these days. " - Peggy Noonan, born Margaret Ellen Noonan

"All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient. 'The mind is its own place, and of itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.' But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain or withdraws life's dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within... could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. " - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"In a few lines of poetry he captured one of the great contradictions of the world: the heroism of people doing something, even knowing it was a crazy something. And he showed how the establishment has used music for thousands of years to support its way of thinking." - Pete Seeger, born Peter Seeger

"In that case its influence is nil or baneful. Take Christian morality: what other teaching could have had more hold on minds than that spoken in the name of a crucified God, and could have acted with all its mystical force, all its poetry of martyrdom, its grandeur in forgiving executioners? And yet the institution was more powerful than the religion: soon Christianity — a revolt against imperial Rome — was conquered by that same Rome; it accepted its maxims, customs, and language. The Christian church accepted the Roman law as its own, and as such — allied to the State — it became in history the most furious enemy of all semi-communist institutions, to which Christianity appealed at Its origin." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

"For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping. " - Peter Medawar, fully Sir Peter Brian Medawar

"As to what we call music in everyday language, to me architecture is music, gardening is music, farming is music, painting is music, poetry is music. In all the occupations of life where beauty has been the inspiration, where the divine wine has been poured out, there is music. But among all the different arts, the art of music has been specially considered divine, because it is the exact miniature of the law working through the whole universe. For instance, if we study ourselves we shall find that the beats of the pulse and the heart, the inhaling and exhaling of the breath are all the work of rhythm. Life depends upon the rhythmic working of the whole mechanism of the body. Breath manifests as voice, as word, as sound; and the sound is continually audible, the sound without and the sound within ourselves. That is music; it shows that there is music both outside and within ourselves." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"He who approaches the temple of the Muses without inspiration, in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs. " - Plato NULL

"Variety in poetry breeds self-indulgence; in gymnastics, disease: simplicity there puts temperance in the soul; here it puts health in the body. " - Plato NULL

"Whoever takes up Walt Whitman’s book as a student of Poetry alone, will not rightly understand it: many and many a line and passage will appear to him common, insignificant as a drop of water—has like that drop of water latent within it, power enough to furnish forth a flash of lightning and a peal of thunder if only it be taken up where the right conditions for liberating that force are present. I think he will one day win as ardent adhesion from men of science and philosophers, as from lovers of art, and they need him most of all." - Anne Gilchrist, née Burrows

"I see that no counting of syllables will reveal the mechanism of the music; and that this rushing spontaneity could not stay to bind itself with the fetters of metre. But I know that the music is there, and that I would not for something change ears with those who cannot hear it. And I know that poetry must do one of two things,--either own this man as equal with her highest completest manifestors, or stand aside, and admit that there is something come into the world nobler, diviner than herself, one that is free of the universe, and can tell its secrets as none before." - Anne Gilchrist, née Burrows

"We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands... searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living... for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it." - Hillary Rodham Clinton

"Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." - Albert Einstein

"Or, to express this in another way, suggested to me by Professor Suzuki, in connection with "seeing into our own nature, poetry is the something that we see, but the seeing and the something are one; without the seeing there is no something, no something, no seeing. There is neither discovery nor creation: only the perfect, indivisible experience." - R. H. Blyth, fully Reginald Horace Blyth

"If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry." - Rachel Carson, fully Rachel Louise Carson

"An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence." - Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler

"Fiction and poetry are the only way one can stop time and give an account of an experience and nail it down so that it lasts forever." - Rebecca West, pen name of Mrs. Cicily Maxwell Andrews, born Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West

"I knew that the languages which one learns there are necessary to understand the works of the ancients; and that the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind; that famous deeds of history ennoble it and, if read with understanding, aid in maturing one's judgment; that the reading of all the great books is like conversing with the best people of earlier times; it is even studied conversation in which the authors show us only the best of their thoughts; that eloquence has incomparable powers and beauties; that poetry has enchanting delicacy and sweetness; that mathematics has very subtle processes which can serve as much to satisfy the inquiring mind as to aid all the arts and diminish man's labor; that treatises on morals contain very useful teachings and exhortations to virtue; that theology teaches us how to go to heaven; that philosophy teaches us to talk with appearance of truth about things, and to make ourselves admired by the less learned; that law, medicine, and the other sciences bring honors and wealth to those who pursue them; and finally, that it is desirable to have examined all of them, even to the most superstitious and false in order to recognize their real worth and avoid being deceived thereby" - René Descartes

"If music and sweet poetry agree, as they must needs (the sister and the brother), then must the love be great 'twixt thee and me, because thou lov'st the one, and I the other." - Richard Barnfield

"The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite." - Richard Dawkins

"The word 'mundane' has come to mean boring and dull, and it really shouldn't. It should mean the opposite because it comes from the Latin 'mundus', meaning the world, and the world is anything but dull; the world is wonderful. There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality." - Richard Dawkins

"There's real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality." - Richard Dawkins

"In the television age, the key distinction is between the candidate who can speak poetry and the one who can only speak prose." - Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon

"One day while studying a [William Butler] Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life. I recognized that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character, and events of one's own life." - Robert Bly

"The greatest mathematics has the simplicity and inevitableness of supreme poetry and music, standing on the borderland of all that is wonderful in Science, and all that is beautiful in Art. " - Robert James Turnbull

"The Talmud was right in its day and I am right in mine." - Samuel Holdheim

"As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?" - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

"I worry about people who get born nowadays, because they get born into such tiny families, sometimes into no family at all. When you're the only pea in the pod, your parents are likely to get you confused with the Hope Diamond. And that encourages you to talk too much." - Russell Baker. fully Russell Wayne Baker

"The best pastimes for a true enjoyer of leisure who has to stay at home . . . reading by the fireside. . . . Listening to music." - Salvador de Madariaga, fully Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo

"In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life." - Salvatore Quasimodo

"Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral." - Salvatore Quasimodo

"However important it is that love shall precede marriage, it is far more important that it shall continue after marriage." - Samson Raphael Hirsch

"Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing." - Samuel Butler

"Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Politeness is fictitious benevolence. It supplies the place of it among those who see each other only in public, or but little. The want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or other." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"The exactest vigilance and caution can never maintain a single day of unmingled innocence, much less can the utmost efforts of incorporated mind reach the summits of speculative virtue." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson

"Every goal, every action, every thought, every feeling one experiences, whether it be consciously or unconsciously known, is an attempt to increase one's level of peace of mind." - Sidney Madwed

"In the deep, unwritten wisdom of life there are many things to be learned that cannot be taught. We never know them by hearing them spoken, but we grow into them by experience and recognize them through understanding. Understanding is a great experience in itself, but it does not come through instruction." - Anthony Hope, fully Sir Anthony Hope Hawkins

"My dream ascend unto thee: this already rare clarity of a heart that thought, I think I'm alone in my home monotone And all around me, living in idolatry On a mirror that reflects its calm sleep Herodias in clear diamond look ..." - Stephane Mallarme, born Étienne Mallarmé

"One of my favorite songs is "Something's Coming". It was written in less than 48 hours during early West Side Story rehearsals. The actor playing Tony just didn't have the kind of "weight" that made you want to follow his adventures. But he could sing a 2/4 song better than anybody. So I wrote the song thinking it would give him an opportunity to establish himself on the stage. And give him confidence. And then he would give the rest of the company confidence ... and it worked." - Stephen Sondheim, fully Stephen Joshua Sondheim

"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly." - Theodor W. Adorno, born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund

"Books follow morals, and not morals books." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"In our totality we are born of the Earth. Our spirituality itself is earth-derived... If there is no spirituality in the earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves." - Thomas Berry

"There is a perennial nobleness and even sacredness in work. Were he ever so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works." - Thomas Carlyle

"How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city?" - Thomas Merton

"In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals." - Thomas Macaulay, fully Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"Made poetry a mere mechanical art. I know that Thou art infinitely gracious, but what will become of me?" - William Cowper

"Man disavows, and Deity disowns me; Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers, weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I'm called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence worse than Abiram's. Him the vindictive rod of angry Justice sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshy tomb, am buried above ground." - William Cowper

"Then, shifting his side (as a lawyer knows how)." - William Cowper