18 verified voices in Literature & poetry · 12 shown here, a fresh sample each day
“To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that. My business is circumference.”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1862)
“Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons—the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”
— Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (1882)
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925) (1925)
“Art is the path of the creator to his work. The paths or methods are ideal and eternal, though few men ever see them”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet (Essays: Second Series) (1844)
“If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.”
— Emily Dickinson, Letters to T. W. Higginson (in 'Emily Dickinson's Letters', The Atlantic Monthly) (1862)
“A Man's life of any worth is a continual allegory, and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1819)
“but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity, / Not harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue.”
— William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798) (1798)
“The destiny of art in our time is to transmit from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that well-being for men consists in being united together”
— Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (trans. Aylmer Maude) (1897)
“I compare human life to a large Mansion of Many apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being as yet shut upon me”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1818)
“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.”
— John Keats, Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends (ed. Sidney Colvin) (1819)
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