we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character.
We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.
When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.
The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.
Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.
It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind. Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.
In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.
Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second love comes on the scene, because most hearts aren't big enough to love more than one person like that.
You have never tasted freedom, friend, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel.
I can't stand accessories.
What good was owning the world when he’d have no choice except to defend himself against every person in it? Personally, he’d rather be a beggar with one true friend than a prince surrounded by two-faced assassins. ’ (Aiden)