Shall hope prevail where clamorous hate is rife, Shall sweet love prosper or high dreams have place Amid the tumult of reverberant strife 'Twixt ancient creeds, 'twixt race and ancient race, That mars the grave, glad purposes of life, Leaving no refuge save thy succoring face?
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Our dead brothers still live for us and bid us think of life, not death -- of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of Spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil, our trumpets, sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.
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I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers at their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever knows. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.
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We see but dimly through the mists and vapors Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funeral tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.
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I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness... I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.
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Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns, Amid the rustle of his planted hills,...
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The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
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We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life!...of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless...of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here...that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.' That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.
What will your verse be?
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Vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts, unutterably vain; Worthless as withered weeds, or idlest froth amid the boundless main.
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We live amid falling taboos. In our crowded little hour of history we have seen how the prejudice of religion no longer can bar the way to the...
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A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.
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Every intellectual effort sets us apart from the commonplace, and leads us by hidden and difficult paths to secluded spots where we find ourselves amid unaccustomed thoughts.
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That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud, In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,...
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We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, 'O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here, that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.' That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
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We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
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As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of 'dead! dead!' absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the suf...
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I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
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As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of "dead! dead!" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the suf...
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Life is full of doors that don't open when you knock, equally spaced amid those that open when you don't want them to.
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I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves in the mire and die. Something magnificent is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.
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What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society.
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O bid me mount and sail up there Amid the cloudy wrack,...
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We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
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The touch of reality is salvation for the man who smothers amid forms and shadows. A blind man would rejoice in sight though his eyes opened on the carnage of a battlefield.
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...many men choose a wife amid the deft-fingered clerks in preference to the society misses. The woman clerk has studied the value of concentr...
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Cried out the whole night long, Crying amid the glittering sea,...
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Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.
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We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages. We live amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip our feet with, and al...
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The art of progress is to preserve order amid change.
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