pull down to refresh
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow
T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled.
Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander
Someone said, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know.
T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays:
What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
Romeo: Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems
Only through time time is conquered
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
There's no vocabulary For love within a family, love that's lived in But not looked at, love within the light of which All else is seen, the love within which All other love finds speech. This love is silent.
T.S. Eliot
The God Thou servest is thine own appetite, wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub. To Him I'll build an altar and a church, and offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.
----Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus
We die with the dying;
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
T.S. Eliot
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
T.S. Eliot
There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... .
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.
---William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Accursed be he that first invented war.
Christopher Marlowe
We all are men, in our own natures frail, and capable of our flesh; few are angels.
William Shakespeare, Henry VIII
Heavens can witness I love none but you:
From my embracements thus he breaks away.
O that mine arms could close this isle about,
That I might pull him to me where I would!
Or that these tears that drizzle from mine eyes
Had power to mollify his stony heart,
That when I had him we might never part.
Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
So now I have sworn to bury
All this dead body of hate
I feel so free and so clear
By the loss of that dead weight
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Nay, could their numbers countervail the stars,
Or ever-drizzling drops of April showers,
Or wither'd leaves that autumn shaketh down,
Yet would the Soldan by his conquering power
So scatter and consume them in his rage,
That not a man should live to rue their fall.*
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great
Bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
YOUNGER MORTIMER: Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which when men aspire,
They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd,
And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,
Why shall I grieve at my declining fall?
Farewell, fair queen. Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.
Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
BARABAS: For religion
Hides many mischiefs from suspicion.
Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
What a terrible era in which idiots govern the blind.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
That perfect bliss and sole felicity, the sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
---William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Now I will believe that there are unicorns...
William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness.
They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal. The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.
---William Butler Yeats
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
William Shakespeare, Othello
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Peace? I hate the word as I hate hell and all Montagues.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
if you don't concentrate on what you are doing then the thing that you are doing is not what you are thinking.
---Alfred Lord Tennyson
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes.
---Alfred Lord Tennyson
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
---William Butler Yeats
There rolls the deep where grew the tree.
O earth, what changes hast thou seen!
There where the long street roars, hath been
The stillness of the central sea.
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.
---W.B. Yeats
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
- Tithonus
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
----William Butler Yeats
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
... WHEN ONE LOOKS INTO THE DARKNESS THERE IS ALWAYS SOMETHING THERE...
The tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.
---W. B. Yeats
... the common people are always ready to blame the beautiful.
Active evil is better than passive good
---William Blake
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping...I hear it in the deep heart's core.
---William Butler Yeats
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
---William Butler Yeats
And I will find some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings...
---W.B. Yeats
Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps.
---William Blake
Joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine. Under every grief and pine, runs a joy with silken twine.
---William Blake
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him up for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
----W.B. Yeats
Knowledge is Life with wings.
---William Blake