terribly

Emily Dickinson: It sifts from leaden sieves…

 Poems  Tagged with: ,
Dec 242014
 

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain,—
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem,—
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen,—
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

 

– From Complete Poems. 1924.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: A foolish consistency…

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Nov 262014
 

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

from Self Reliance

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: On Readers

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Oct 202014
 

Readers may be divided into four classes:

  1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
  2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
  3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
  4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.

Friedrich Nietzsche: … that one endures

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Oct 152014
 

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

– from The Will to Power

Jeffrey Taylor: People deserve respect; ideologies do not

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Oct 092014
 

We must never cede to misguided notions of civility and refrain from criticizing religion, which is, after all, nothing more than hallowed ideology expressed through fantastic fables.  People deserve respect; ideologies do not.  Doctrines deriving from allegedly divine revelation demand the closest scrutiny.  The very concept of religious revelation – from which Islam, Christianity, and Judaism draw their validity — is an affront to rationalism and reasoned discussion.

“Bill Maher’s atheist values: Why progressives must defend enlightenment, critique religious extremism” Slate. 2014.10.08