Quotes
Quotes about Wit
Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry.
The poet, as everyone knows, must strike his individual note sometime between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He may hold it a long time, or a short time, but it is then that he must strike it or never. School and college have been conducted with the almost express purpose of keeping him busy with something else till the danger of his ever creating anything is past.
Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.
Happy the poet who with ease can steer From grave to gay, from lively to severe. [Lat., Heureux qui, dans ses vers, sait d'une voix legere Passer du grave au doux, du plaisant au severe.]
Ah, poet-dreamer, within those walls What triumphs shall be yours! For all are happy and rich and great In that City of By-and-by.
O brave poets, keep back nothing; Nor mix falsehood with the whole! Look up Godward! speak the truth in Worthy song from earnest soul! Hold, in high poetic duty, Truest Truth the fairest Beauty.
Ovid's a rake, as half his verses show him, Anacreon's morals are a still worse sample, Catullus scarcely has a decent poem, I don't think Sappho's Ode a good example, Although Longinus tells us there is no hymn Where the sublime soars forth on wings more ample; But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one Being with "Formosum Pastor Corydon."
A Poet without Love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.
All men carry about them that which is poyson to serpents: for if it be true that is reported, they will no better abide the touching with man's spittle than scalding water cast upon them: but if it happed to light within their chawes or mouth, especially if it come from a man that is fasting, it is present death.
We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.
Away with the cant of "Measures not men!"--the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.
England has never enjoyed a genuine social revolution. Maybe that's what's wrong with that dear, tepid, vapid, insipid, stuffy, little country.
Politics is the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of social order.
Socialism is Bolshevism with a shave.
Anyone that wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.
You really have to experience the feeling of being with the president in the oval office. ... It's a disease I came to call Ovalitis.
In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get - The Future!
Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.
The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
Commencement speakers have a good deal in common with grandfather clocks: Standing usually some six feet tall, typically ponderous in construction, more traditional than functional, their distinction is largely their noisy communication of essentially commonplace information.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
A criminal trial is like a Russian novel: it starts with exasperating slowness as the characters are introduced to a jury, then there are complications in the form of minor witnesses, the protagonist finally appears and contradictions arise to produce drama, and finally as both jury and spectators grow weary and confused the pace quickens, reaching its climax in passionate final argument.
I was recently on a tour of Latin America,and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.
