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 8,473 active remarks.

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Topic: Truth

Showing 24 of 1,593 · page 3 of 67

“In the first age poetry was only an allegorical theology, to bring into the minds of coarse men, by pleasant and coloured fables, the secrets they could not grasp when truth was shown too openly.”

Original: Car la Poésie n'estoit au premier âge qu'une theologie allegorique, pour faire entrer au cerveau des hommes grossiers, par fables plaisantes et colorées, les secrets qu'ils ne pouvoient comprendre, quand trop ouvertement on leur descouvroit la vérité. — Myth and verse as a veiled way of teaching truth · Abrégé de l'art poétique français, 1565 (French)

Pierre de Ronsard

“The logic knows how to forge unassailable arguments which, nevertheless, do not convince. How easily precise conclusions are drawn from a false premise.”

Original: La lógica sabe fraguar razonamientos inatacables que, á pesar de todo, no convencen. ¡Con tanta facilidad se sacan deducciones precisas de una base falsa! — Bécquer warns that flawless reasoning cannot rescue a false starting point. · Letter IV, Cartas literarias a una mujer (Spanish)

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

“Whoever comes first with such poetry, I shall make a pedestal of all my books for him and lie beneath his feet myself, so that he may stand higher.”

Original: Kto pierwszy z taką poezyą przyjdzie, ja mu z wszystkich książek moich postument zrobię, i sam się położę pod nogami, aby stał wyżej i prawdę zawsze oglądał z wysoka. — He values poetry that serves truth so highly that personal literary fame becomes secondary. · Letter to his mother, February 1845 (Polish)

Juliusz Słowacki

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