Entry 295

The eyes those silent tongues of love.

Miguel de Cervantes

Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Ray Bradbury

Blinding ignorance does mislead us. O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

Leonardo da Vinci

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

John Steinbeck

The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.

Jack Hanna

Babies have big heads and big eyes, and tiny little bodies with tiny little arms and legs. So did the aliens at Roswell! I rest my case.

William Shatner

Entry 294

Plato in the School of Athens

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

Plato

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Plato

The good is the beautiful.

Plato

 

 

 

 

 

 

Entry 293

"Cooper delighted in confounding the ignorant with the mystification of jargon."

From James Fenimore Cooper: A BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDY by JAMES GROSSMAN

***
“The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority."
James Fenimore Cooper

"The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again...."
James Fenimore Cooper

Entry 292

For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
Vincent Van Gogh

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.
Vincent Van Gogh

The way to know life is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.
Vincent Van Gogh

Entry 291

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.
Marcus Aurelius

You have to believe in yourself.
Sun Tzu

A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity.
Robert Heinlein

I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
Bob Dylan

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Thomas Wolfe

Entry 290

“The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."
Wallace Stevens

“After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption."
Wallace Stevens

“In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all."
Wallace Stevens

“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.”
Wallace Stevens

“Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”
Wallace Stevens

“The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.”
Wallace Stevens

“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”
Wallace Stevens

Entry 289

La Belle Dame Sans Merci
By Sir Frank Dicksee

"...if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all..."
John Keats

"Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. How beautiful are the retired flowers! how would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, admire me I am a violet! dote upon me I am a primrose! Modern poets differ from the Elizabethans in this."
John Keats

"I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read--I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School--and I will call the Child able to read, the Soulmade from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the Minds Bible, it is the Minds experience, it is the teat from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity--As various as the Lives of Men are--so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, Souls, Identical Souls of the sparks of his own essence-"
John Keats