Quote of the Day for 2016-09-14

"So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine, / And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine."

— Edward de Vere (1550-1604) "Care and Disappointment," Paradise of Dainty Devices (1576)

Amphora depicting Satyrs making wine by Amasis (circa 550-510 BCE)

Quote of the Day for 2016-09-05, Labor Day

"And all labour without any play, boys, / Makes Jack a dull boy in the end."

— Alexander Hay Japp (1837-1905) "Some Book-Worms Will Sit and Will Study," "Vers de Société," The Gentleman's Magazine (November 1880)

Members of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, marching in a May Day parade in New York City (May 1, 1914) Photograph by George Grantham Bain

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-21

"Maybe all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn't actually want to say but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it's the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic—makes it poetry."

— Ted Hughes (1930-1998) "Ted Hughes, The Art of Poetry No. 71," The Paris Review (Spring 1995)

In Bed The Kiss by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1892)

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-19

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry."

— W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) "Anima Hominis" from Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917)

Sigmund Freud's couch in his home at Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria (1938) Photograph by Edmund Engelman

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-09

"Half light, half shade, / She stood, a sight to make an old man young."

— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) "The Gardener's Daughter," Poems: In Two Volumes, volume 2 (1842)

Marlene Dietrich as Amy Jolly in Morocco (1930)

Quote of the Day for 2016-08-08

"Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, / speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble / of all these syllables a single word / before the purpose of speech is gone."

— Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) "This Image or Another," The Nation (December 28, 1932)

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563)

Quote of the Day for 2016-07-07

"Take, O boatman, thrice thy fee,— / Take, I give it willingly; / For, invisible to thee, / Spirits twain have crossed with me."

— Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) "The Passage," The Poems of Ludwig Uhland (1831) Translated by Sarah Austin

Charon Ferrying the Shades by Pierre Subleyras (circa 1735-1744)

Quote of the Day for 2016-06-25

"Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go? / I am gone and never come back to you. / I never return."

— Sappho (circa 630-570 BCE) Fragment

The Vestal Virgin Tuccia by Giovanni Battista Moroni (circa 1555)

Quote of the Day for 2016-06-16

"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose."

— Mario Cuomo (1932-2015) Quoted by Fred Barnes in "Meet Mario the Moderate," The New Republic (April 8, 1985)

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton walking away from his airplane as they head to a campaign rally at Amway Arena in Orlando, Florida (October 20, 2008) Photograph by Joe Raedle

Quote of the Day for 2016-04-28

"The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion."

— Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) "Lectures on Education" delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (1855) "What Knowledge is of Most Worth," The Westminster Review (July 1859)

Frontispiece by F. Curtus Bon for Almagestum Novum by Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1651)

Quote of the Day for 2016-04-01

"But that poetry should be as pervious as oratory, and plainness her special ornament, were the plain way to barbarism."

— George Chapman (1559-1634) Ovid's Banquet of Sense, preface (1595)

Troilus and Criseyde, Liber II (c. 1385), page 501 from The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer by William Morris, illustration by Edward Burne-Jones (1896)

Quote of the Day for 2016-02-06

"The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety."

— William Wordsworth (1770-1850) "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold," Poems in Two Volumes

Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows by John Constable (1831)

Quote of the Day for 2016-01-22

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it."

— Robert Frost (1875-1963) "The Poetry of Amy Lowell," Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 1925

Erato, Muse of Poetry by Edward Poynter (1870)

Quote of the Day for 2016-01-11

"So, we'll go no more a roving / So late into the night, / Though the heart be still as loving, / And the moon be still as bright."

— Lord Byron (1788-1824) "So, We'll Go No More A Roving," Letter to Thomas Moore, February 28, 1817

Two Manhattans by Nigel Van Wieck (1989)

Quote of the Day for 2015-10-12

"And 'tis remarkable that they
Talk most, who have the least to say."

— Matthew Prior (1664-1721) Alma: or, The Progress of the Mind, canto II

Donald Trump does his signature "You're fired!" gesture during a campaign speech in June 2015. (Photo by Dominick Reuter)

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-29

"The flow'rs anew, returning seasons bring; / But beauty faded has no second spring."

— Ambrose Philips (1674-1749) "Lobbin," Pastorals (first set)

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks canoeing on the pool at their Pickfair estate (circa 1920s).

Quote of the Day for 2015-09-07

"This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."

— T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) "The Hollow Men," Poems: 1909-1925

The Discovery of the Gunpowder Plot and the Taking of Guy Fawkes by Henry Perronet Briggs (circa 1823)