Quotable

We are English teachers, our task is to teach the beauty and complexity of language and its hidden truths. We teach the investigation of thought and how it is connected to the word. Within that connection lies the truth, often subjective, that can shape and mold a generation, or at the very least, capture it for others to inquire and ponder.                           ~from the blog of a colleague

When I get a little money, I buy books.
And if there is any left over, I buy food.
~Desiderius Erasmus

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
~Plato~

Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me
in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life.
~Friedrich Schiller~

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
~Percy Bysshe Shelley~

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric;
out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
~W. B. Yeats~

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found words.
~Robert Frost~

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.
~Walt Whitman~

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne~

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet
can earn much more money writing or talking about
his art than he can by practicing it.
~W. H. Auden~

Poets aren't very useful
Because they aren't consumeful
or very produceful.
~Ogden Nash~

Don't tell me the moon is shining;
show me the glint of light on broken glass.
~Anton Chekhov~

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~Sylvia Plath~

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived,
but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
~Maya Angelou~

The unexamined life is not worth living.
~Socrates~

The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as
the sole cause of all our adversities.
~Sophocles~

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim.
When a man does not know what harbor
he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
~Seneca~

You were not born to live as brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge.
~Dante Alighieri~

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge~

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone
not by violence, but by oft falling.
~Titus Lucretius Carus

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

The power of accurate observation is commonly
called cynicism by those who have not got it..
~George Bernard Shaw~

The house of delusions is cheap to build but drafty to live in.
~A. E. Housman~

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above
the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk
to the level of the demons.
~Aldous Huxley~

Where is the life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~T. S. Eliot~

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know,
in the silence you don't know,
you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
~Samuel Beckett~

An era can be said to end when its illusions are exhausted.
~Arthur Miller~

Sow a thought and you reap an act;
Sow an act and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit and you reap a character;
Sow a character and you reap a destiny.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.
~Dr. Seuss~

Truth is always strange, stranger than fiction.
~Lord Byron~

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.
~Emily Dickinson~

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels.
~Lillian Hellman~

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
~George Orwell~

Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
~Oscar Wilde~

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
~Henry David Thoreau~

When you find yourself on the side of the majority,
it is time to stop and reconsider.
~Mark Twain~

Because things are the way they are,
things will not stay the way they are.
~Bertolt Brecht~

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him
by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
~Jonathan Swift~

I am in this earthly world—where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
~William Shakespeare (Macbeth)~

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
~W. H. Auden~

Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing, and dancing
sooner than of war.
~Homer~