Literature: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 8

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DriveLiterature

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The sentence comes near the end of 'Circles', an essay in Emerson's Essays: First Series (1841). Its central image is that a larger circle can always be drawn around any circle: every truth, habit or achievement can be outgrown. People grow, Emerson argues, when something carries them beyond themselves and past their usual caution. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), a former minister from Concord, Massachusetts, led Transcendentalism, an American movement that trusted personal intuition and nature over tradition. His essay 'Self-Reliance' appeared in the same book.

Ralph Waldo EmersonRead card

WonderLiterature

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

Melville wrote this in 'Hawthorne and His Mosses', a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories printed in The Literary World in August 1850 and signed only 'a Virginian Spending July in Vermont'. The two writers had met on 5 August on a hike up Monument Mountain in Massachusetts. Melville called for American writers who did not copy English models, and aimed this line at a popular author usually taken to be Washington Irving. Moby-Dick followed in 1851, dedicated to Hawthorne, and was little valued until long after his death.

Herman MelvilleRead card

WonderLiterature

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

The line comes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. William Blake (1757–1827) printed his own illustrated books, and before this line he describes etching copper plates with acid, which melts away the surface to show what lies beneath; perception, he suggests, can be cleansed the same way. He goes on: man has closed himself up, and sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. Aldous Huxley named his 1954 book The Doors of Perception after the line, and the band The Doors named themselves after Huxley's book.

William BlakeRead card

StillnessLiterature

They also serve who only stand and wait.

This is the last line of the sonnet that begins 'When I consider how my light is spent', which John Milton (1608–1674) wrote after losing his sight, probably in 1655. He fears that his 'one talent' is wasted, like the coin buried by the servant in the Gospel parable (a talent was a sum of money). Patience answers that God does not need man's work; they also serve who only stand and wait. Blind, Milton went on to dictate Paradise Lost.

John MiltonRead card

StillnessLiterature

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.

These are the first two lines of a four-line poem by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The other two wonder what the dawn will be like when it comes: will it have feathers, like a bird, or roll in like waves on a shore? The poem was first printed in 1896, ten years after her death, under the title 'Dawn' chosen by her editors. Dickinson spent almost all her life in her family's house in Amherst, Massachusetts, and wrote nearly 1,800 poems, but only about ten were published while she lived.

Emily DickinsonRead card

StillnessLiterature

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

The words belong to a character, not to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) himself. In ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, a chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan Karamazov tells his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, a story he has made up: Christ returns to 16th-century Seville and is arrested by the aged Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor argues that people cannot bear freedom, and that without a firm sense of what to live for they would rather destroy themselves than go on living, even with bread in abundance. The card follows Andrew MacAndrew's 1970 English translation.

Fyodor DostoevskyRead card

StillnessLiterature

To live without hope is to cease to live.

Often credited to the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), but this exact wording has not been traced to any of his books. The idea is close to his own life. Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a circle that discussed banned ideas, he went through a mock execution before his sentence was changed to four years of hard labour in a Siberian prison camp. He drew on those years in Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62), where prisoners hold on to small hopes, such as the day of their release, that keep them going.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

These are the opening lines of a short, eight-line poem by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), the American poet who lived a very private life in Amherst, Massachusetts, and published only about ten poems in her lifetime. The rest of the poem suggests that believing in something we doubt, such as a life after this one, does not stir us the way a single, unrepeatable life does. After her death her sister Lavinia found nearly 1,800 poems, many copied into small hand-sewn booklets. They appeared gradually from 1890 onwards.

Emily Dickinson, poem published posthumouslyRead card

StillnessLiterature

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

From The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), an essay by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), best known for his wit, his comedies and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde argues that a socialism built on freedom rather than state authority would release people from poverty and the worries of property, so that each could develop their own personality. He also criticises charity, which he felt kept poverty going instead of ending it. Living, in his sense, means becoming fully yourself; merely existing means getting through the days.

Oscar WildeRead card

DriveLiterature

Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.

From Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 1821, revised 1829), a late novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the German poet, novelist, scientist and Weimar statesman. The line sits in ‘Aus Makariens Archiv’ (‘From Makarie's Archive’), a set of aphorisms presented as the papers of Makarie, a wise older woman in the story. The German reads: ‘Es ist nicht genug, zu wissen, man muß auch anwenden; es ist nicht genug, zu wollen, man muß auch tun.’ English versions differ slightly, but the point is the same.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, “Aus Makariens Archiv”Read card

DriveLiterature

He who moves not forward goes backward.

Hermann and Dorothea (1797) is a verse epic by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), set in a small German town as refugees from the French Revolutionary Wars pass through. In the third canto, Hermann's father, an innkeeper, urges his son to show more ambition and praises towns that keep improving. He introduces the line as the true little saying of the ancients: ‘Wer nicht vorwärts geht, der kommt zurücke!’ Goethe did not coin it; he gave an existing proverb to one of his characters.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea (1796–97): 'Wer nicht vorwärts geht, der kommt zurücke!', introduced in the poem as an old sayingRead card

StillnessLiterature

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

The line comes from A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway's novel about an American serving as an ambulance officer with the Italian army in the First World War. Hemingway knew that front: in 1918, aged eighteen, he was badly wounded there as a Red Cross volunteer. In the novel the sentence is darker than it looks on a poster. The narrator goes straight on to say that those who will not break, the world kills. Hemingway (1899–1961) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

Ernest HemingwayRead card

DriveLiterature

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

There is no evidence that Hemingway said this. In April 1949 the columnist Walter Winchell quoted the sportswriter Red Smith: 'You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.' Smith may have been echoing Paul Gallico, who wrote in 1946 that a writer reaches readers only by opening a vein and bleeding onto the page a little. Hemingway's name was attached in the 1970s. The wry point: typing is easy; putting something true of yourself on the page is the hard part.

After Red Smith (c. 1949); Hemingway credit from 1973Read card

DriveLiterature

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

A close paraphrase of Orwell. In 'The Freedom of the Press', a preface he wrote in 1945 for Animal Farm, he put it this way: 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.' His target was the voluntary censorship of British publishers and writers who, during the war, avoided criticising the Soviet Union; Animal Farm itself was turned down by several publishers. The preface was not printed with the book, and its typescript was found and published only in 1972.

George OrwellRead card

StillnessLiterature

Who controls the past controls the future.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) this is a slogan of the Party that rules Oceania, and it continues: 'who controls the present controls the past.' The hero, Winston Smith, works at the Ministry of Truth rewriting old newspaper articles so that the record always agrees with the Party's latest line. The novel shows a totalitarian state, one that seeks control over every part of public and private life, turning memory itself into a tool of power. George Orwell (1903–1950) was an English writer who also wrote Animal Farm.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)Read card

StillnessLiterature

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

The line comes early in A Room of One's Own (1929), an essay based on two talks Woolf gave at the women's colleges of Cambridge in 1928. She describes a lavish lunch at a rich men's college in 'Oxbridge', her blend of Oxford and Cambridge, and the ease that settles over her afterwards, with nobody to impress. That evening she eats a plain dinner of beef, prunes and custard at a poor women's college. The contrast drives the essay: to create, a mind needs money, space and time of its own.

Virginia WoolfRead card

StillnessLiterature

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

A popular, sharpened version of a real sentence in A Room of One's Own (1929): 'I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.' Woolf asks why so few women appear in English literary history for centuries, and finds the answer in living conditions rather than talent: women had little money of their own, little schooling and no private room to write in. To show it, she imagines Shakespeare's equally gifted sister, Judith, whose gift is wasted for exactly those reasons.

After Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929)Read card

StillnessLiterature

They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Often credited to Maya Angelou, but the earliest known version appears in Richard Evans' Quote Book (1971), attributed to Carl W. Buehner, a leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The quotation researcher Garson O'Toole (Quote Investigator) found that Angelou's name was attached in 2003, when a widely forwarded message wrongly credited a set of sayings to her and a newspaper printed it. No record shows Angelou saying it. The idea itself is simple and familiar: the words of a meeting fade, the feeling stays.

Carl W. Buehner (1971); long credited to Maya AngelouRead card

DriveLiterature

You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.

From Letter to My Daughter (2008), a book of short essays. Angelou had one son and no daughter; she dedicated the book to the many women she thought of as daughters. The line comes from a passage of advice on hard times: do not complain, change what you can, and when you cannot, change the way you think about it. Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was an American poet and memoirist, best known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

Maya Angelou, interview (1977)Read card

StillnessLiterature

Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, 'You owe me.'

The line is not by the Persian poet Hafez but by the American poet Daniel Ladinsky, from The Gift (1999). Ladinsky has said his poems are inspired by Hafez rather than translated from the Persian, and specialists find no such lines in Hafez's work. The short poem ends by calling this a love that lights the whole sky. Hafez, who died in Shiraz in 1390, is Iran's best-loved poet; many Iranians still open his collected poems, the Divan, at random for guidance, a custom called fal-e Hafez.

Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift (1999), written in the spirit of HafezRead card

StillnessLiterature

I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.

Like several famous 'Hafez' lines in English, this is Daniel Ladinsky's own writing, from his popular books of poems in Hafez's spirit rather than translations of his Persian. The real Hafez, a 14th-century poet of Shiraz, wrote ghazals: short lyric poems in rhyming couplets where love, wine and the divine blur together, so that many can be read two ways at once. His tomb in Shiraz stands in a garden where visitors still recite his verse. Knowing who wrote this line takes nothing from its kindness; it only credits the right poet.

Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift (1999), written in the spirit of HafezRead card

StillnessLiterature

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.

Credited to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), but the wording is modern and matches no quatrain in scholarly translations. Khayyam was a Persian mathematician and astronomer who worked on the Jalali calendar, introduced in 1079 and more accurate than the Julian calendar then used in Europe. The four-line poems (rubaiyat) credited to him reached the West through Edward FitzGerald's free English version of 1859. Many of the quatrains accepted as his do say what this line says: the past is gone, tomorrow is uncertain, so take the present while you have it.

Omar Khayyam (attributed)Read card

StillnessLiterature

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, moves on.

These are Edward FitzGerald's words, from his Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), a free English version of Persian quatrains credited to Khayyam. The stanza goes on: neither piety nor wit can lure the finger back to cancel half a line, and no tears can wash out a word of it. FitzGerald, a Victorian poet, rearranged, merged and sometimes invented lines, so scholars read his Rubáiyát as an English poem in its own right. Its images of fate and passing time made it one of the most quoted poems in English.

Omar KhayyamRead card

DriveLiterature

You can't cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

The line is widely credited to Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet, songwriter and educator, but no one has yet traced it to one of his own books. Quotation collections point to a 1968 anthology, Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi, Nehru, Tagore, which names no original work. It does fit the life he led. In 1901 he opened a small school at Santiniketan, which grew into Visva-Bharati University in 1921; in 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; and he travelled to more than thirty countries on five continents.

Rabindranath Tagore (attributed)Read card