Paul Valery
The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.…
Month: September 2007
Christopher Logue
Poem If the night flights keep you awake I will call London Airport and tell them to land their dangerous junk elsewhere. And if you fall asleep with the sleeve of my jacket under your head, sooner than wake you, I’ll cut it off. But if you say: ‘Fix me a plug on this mixer’, I grumble and take my time.…
Horace
They change their clime, not their disposition, who run across the sea.…
Vladimir Horowitz
It is better to make your own mistakes than to copy someone else’s…
Rabindranath Tagore
Stray Birds Stray birds of summer come to my window to sing and fly away. And yellow leaves of autumn, which have no songs, flutter and fall there with a sigh.…
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Never read any book that is not a year old.…
Neils Bohr
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.…
John Dryden
Happy The Man Happy the man, and happy he alone, He who can call today his own: He who, secure within, can say, Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today. Be fair or foul or rain or shine The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine. Not Heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour.…
Jorge Luis Borges
The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.…
T E Hulme
Above the Dock Above the quiet dock in midnight, Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height, Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.…
Henri-Frederic Amiel
The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.…
Fred Trueman
Batsman (having just been clean bowled): That was one hell of a ball, Fred. Fred Trueman: Ay, it were wasted on thee.…
Winston Churchill
There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you.…
Robert Herrick
Delight in Disorder A sweet disorder in the dress Kindles in clothes a wantonness : A lawn about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction : An erring lace which here and there Enthrals the crimson stomacher : A cuff neglectful, and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly : A winning wave (deserving note) In the tempestuous petticoat : A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility : Do more bewitch me than when art Is too precise in every part.…
Isaac Bashevis Singer
God sends burdens, and shoulders, too.…
J Brotherton
My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in the fewness of my wants.…
Matt Harvey
If love can build a bridge, can affection put up a shelf?…
Madeleine L’Engle
You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.…
Thomas Carlyle
A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.…
R S Thomas
Play Jocosity through verbosity can lead to animosity as an attitude from exacitude can become a platitude Complementarity leads not with majority to popularity as scrupulosity has the capacity to encourage pomposity. Belief in the Trinity for most of humanity suggests a nonentity I fear theology is just an allergy of anthropology Heigh-ho that the universe through over-rehearsal should become farcical. Relativity in the face of gravity is incivility. In a Calvinist’s heaven, where no foot is cloven, who are the forgiven? Time does not prevaricate. Where the heart pontificates the questions proliferate. Is not astrology disguised as the economy the human pathology? One could go on and on like traffic in London – It is late. I have done.…
Robert Schumann
In order to compose, all you need do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.…
Spike Milligan
Things that go ‘bump’ in the night Should not really give one a fright. It’s the hole in each ear That lets in the fear, That, and the absence of light!…
Fred Allen
A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.…
Pete Seeger
Education is what you get when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don’t.…
Henry Van Dyke
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.…
Carol Ann Duffy
The Light Gatherer When you were small, your cupped palms each held a candleworth under the skin, enough light to begin, and as you grew, light gathered in you, two clear raindrops in your eyes, warm pearls, shy, in the lobes of your ears, even always the light of a smile after your tears. Your kissed feet glowed in my one hand, or I’d enter a room to see the corner you played in lit like a stage set, the crown of your bowed head spotlit. When language came, it glittered like a river, silver, clever with fish, and you slept with the whole moon held in your arms for a night light where I knelt watching. Light gatherer. You fell from a star into my lap, the soft lamp at the bedside mirrored in you, and now you shine like a snowgirl, a buttercup under a chin, the wide blue yonder you squeal at and fly in, like a jewelled cave, turquoise and diamond and gold, opening out at the end of a tunnnel of years.…