Quotations

Remarks poets made beyond their poems — letters, journals, conversation — gathered as a readable library. Browse by topic or author, or search the words themselves. Currently 8,011 active remarks.

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Showing 24 of 8,011 · page 176 of 334

“Everything in the world exists to culminate in a book.”

Original: Tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre. — Distils Mallarmé’s belief in literature as a gathering point for experience and the world. · Le Livre, instrument spirituel, 1895; collected in Divagations, 1897 (French)

Stéphane Mallarmé

“To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the pleasure of the poem, which lies in the delight of guessing little by little; to suggest it, that is the dream.”

Original: Nommer un objet, c’est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer, voilà le rêve. — Captures the Symbolist ideal of suggestion, mystery and the reader’s imaginative participation. · Interview with Jules Huret, Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire, 1891 (French)

Stéphane Mallarmé

“Perseverance too, without which patience is a mere passive endurance.”

Distinguishing active persistence from merely enduring difficulty · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“The spirit of anger is the enemy of the spirit of architecture.”

Suggesting that creation depends upon calm rather than anger · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“And even though the image be distorted—as in all works of art, even the greatest, it always must be—yet it is joy even to have created the poorest image of a dream.”

Finding creative joy even in the inevitable gap between vision and achievement · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“To create in the image of his dream is the hope and the despair of every artist.”

Capturing the artist's struggle to make an inner vision tangible · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“To build without a plan is to heap bricks one on another, to make a cairn, not a house.”

A concise observation on the need for vision before creation · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“The only magic in the city is the magic of imagination, which is, after all, the best magic in the world.”

Celebrating imagination as the source of genuine enchantment · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter IV: The Magic City

“The more highly cultivated the imagination the more intensely joyous are the games.”

Linking imaginative development with a richer experience of play · Essay, Wings and the Child, Part II, Chapter I: Romance in Games

“But there must be love and trust: without that all education outside book-learning is for ever impossible.”

Making affection and trust fundamental to meaningful education · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter IX: Praise and Punishment

“And one need not always "talk down" to children: they understand far better than you think.”

Urging adults to respect children's intelligence and capacity for understanding · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter IX: Praise and Punishment

“Simple rhymes learned when you are very young stay with you all your life.”

Recognising the lasting power of rhythm and language learned in childhood · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter IX: Praise and Punishment

“The object of education is to fit the child for the life of the man.”

Defining education as preparation for the responsibilities of adult life · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter IX: Praise and Punishment

“Be generous of praise—it is the dew that waters the budding flowers of kindness and love and unselfishness: it is to all that is best in the child the true Elixir of Life.”

Presenting encouragement as nourishment for a child's best qualities · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“Before you can begin to lay down the law you must know what that law is, and your heart, soul, and spirit must not only know it, but approve it.”

Insisting that moral authority requires inward conviction and consistency · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“There is nothing from which children, and subject human beings generally, suffer so much as the incoherence of the thought of those in authority over them.”

Warning that inconsistent authority can cause deep confusion and suffering · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“Here is the highest work of the imagination: to teach the child so to put himself in the place of the one he has wronged that the knowledge of that wrong shall be its own punishment.”

Connecting imagination with empathy and moral understanding · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“Only by remembering how you felt and thought when you yourself were a child can you arrive at any understanding of the thoughts and feelings of children.”

Making personal memory the bridge between adult and child experience · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“There is only one way of understanding children; they cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory.”

Arguing that remembered childhood is essential to understanding children · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter VIII: The Moral Code

“All their lives they will love, and expect love—and be sad, wondering helplessly when they do not get it.”

Reflecting on openness to love and the vulnerability that accompanies it · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter I: Of Understanding

“Such people feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world.”

Capturing the persistence of the childhood self within adult life · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter I: Of Understanding

“The grown-ups are the people who once were children and who have forgotten what it felt like to be a child.”

A memorable definition of adulthood as the loss of childhood memory · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter I: Of Understanding

“I do, in fact, know nothing that cannot be known by any one who will go to the only fount of knowledge, experience.”

Grounding knowledge in lived experience rather than authority · Essay, Wings and the Child, Chapter I: Of Understanding

“Let men of letters fight their own way with the public.”

Arguing that writers should earn their standing through their work and readers · Letter to Lord Sidmouth, 20 April 1821

Sir Walter Scott