Sedulia's Quotations

Frances Cornford: Youth is like a water-wetted stone

Remember this before your hour is flown;
O you, who are so glorious, beware!
Your youth is like a water-wetted stone,
bright with a beauty that is not its own.

        --Frances Cornford (1886-1960), a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. The whole poem is below.

De Gaulle: Toward the complicated Orient, I flew with simple ideas

Vers l'Orient compliqué, je volais avec des idées simples.

Toward the complicated Orient I flew with simple ideas.

--Charles De Gaulle in Mémoires de Guerre:  L'appel 1940-1942 [Memories of the War: the Appeal, 1940-1942]

[Note: In French, the "Orient" usually refers to the Middle East, not to East Asia as it does in English.]

Tom Stoppard on Skill without imagination, imagination without skill

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

   --Donner, a character in Artist Descending a Staircase, by Tom Stoppard (1937-)

Professor Thomas on Virgil and Bob Dylan

Longtime Harvard Classics Department Chair Richard Thomas, who teaches courses on Virgil and a freshman seminar on Bob Dylan, spoke on the poetic nature of Dylan's lyrics....Professor Thomas demonstrated that Dylan consciously used verses from Virgil, Ovid, Burns and others in his songs....not plagiarizing but following the tradition of great poets as expressed by T.S. Eliot, who wrote, "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."

....Looking at Virgil's most famous lines from the Aeneid, Book 6 on the mission of Rome, Dylan uses word for word Allen Mandelbaum's translations of this couplet in Lonesome Days Blues (from "Love and Theft"): "I am going to spare the defeated, I am going to tame the proud." This literal borrowing is also evident in Dylan's Workingman's Blues, which tracks word for word the Penguin translation of Ovid's exile poems.

         --Brandon Bradkin

Ezra Pound: the woman who was afraid someone might speak to her

The Garden

En robe de parade.
                    --Samain

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
she walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
and she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
and is almost afraid that I
               will commit that indiscretion.

          --Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Senator Inhofe of the Environmental Committee says global warming is due to the sun

Now look, God's still up there. We still have these natural changes, and this is what's going on right now...The warming is due to the sun.

-- Senator James Inhofe, outgoing Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, on global climate change

Tom DeLay campaigns against the cesspool in Washington

[Photo courtesy of hardworkinghippy]

When Tom and his bunch first ran, they campaigned against the cesspool in Washington. After a while they looked around and said, "Hey, this isn't a cesspool, it's a hot tub."

  --Richard Viguerie on Tom DeLay

Masaryk: To know another language is to live another life.

To know another language is to live another life.

--Thomas Masaryk

Frank O'Connor on Michael Collins: Genius is a troublesome bedfellow

Genius is a troublesome bedfellow. When it is absent we sigh for it, when it is present we grow weary of its violence and impetuousness. O'Higgins once said, "I have done nothing without asking myself what Michael Collins would have done under the circumstances"-- which is as though I were to say, "I have written nothing without asking myself what Shakespeare would have written."

What can normality do but keep the bed warm till her troublesome bedfellow, his night-wanderings over, returns, and she, forgetting how she had called God to witness her sighs and groans at his betrayal, looks again with alarm at his rugged frame, catches the breath scented with wine and that subtle odour in the hair which suggests strange contacts; till the eternal, restless marriage is renewed, and new generations, new ways of thought, are in the womb again?

     --Frank O'Connor, pseudonym of Michael Donovan (1903-1966), in The Big Fellow (1937)

Mark Twain: France has usually been governed by prostitutes

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country....France has usually been governed by prostitutes.

        --Mark Twain (real name Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) in private notebooks published after his death