The West, for many centuries, has been dominated by a highly rationalistic mindset that presumes to express and explain the nature of God through words. The East has only recently begun to express its understanding of God in those ways. For the most ...
The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to ass...
He'd kept his figure despite being past his first youth. Pretty good for nearly forty. Who was she fooling? She knew quite well that he was thirty-five and a half, exactly five years older than she. Their birthdays were two days apart. It was absurd ...
The poets say some moths will do anything out of love for a flame [...] The moth takes off again, and we both step back, because he's circling at eye level now and seems to have lost rudder control, smacking into the wall on each round. He circles lo...
Every poet knows that the gift of the gods is not fire but language. “Man dwells poetically on this earth,” Hölderin wrote. Language is the essence of being human. We can think, thanks to language, for thought exists only by the grace of words. ...
Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if oyu planned on fallin gin love with me. But once we m...
Poets often describe love as an emotion that we can't control, one that overwhelms logic and common sense. That's what it was like for me. I didn't plan on falling in love with you, and I doubt if you planned on falling in love with me. But once we m...
See the stars, Lily?" She sighed, surrendering. "Of course." "Do you think they can see the sun coming up?" "I don't know. Probably?" "Do you think they're scared?" "They're burning balls of gas, Calder." "Oh, c'mon. Where's the poet in you?" She exh...
…have poets write about you as if you are alive. Scientifically, it is absolutely true, you are alive. You have a pulse, the waves, and a metabolism, the food chain. A personality, a character, a consciousness, and a sense of purpose…try this- tu...
The good historian, then, must be thus described: he must be fearless, uncorrupted, free, the friend of truth and of liberty; one who, to use the words of the comic poet, calls a fig a fig, and a skiff a skiff, neither giving nor withholding from any...
Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the pure feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the spl...
The whiskey was a good start. I got the idea from Dylan Thomas. He's this poet who drank twenty-one straight whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern in New York and then died on the spot from alcohol poisoning. I've always wanted to hear the bartender's s...
Philosophy is to the mind of the architect as eyesight to his steps. The Term 'genius' when applied to him simply means a man who understands what others only know about. A poet, artist or architect, necessarily 'understands' in this sense and is lik...
Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words h...
The poet must always, in every instance, have the vibrant word... that by it's trenchancy can so wound my soul that it whimpers.... One must know and recognize not merely the direct but the secret power of the word; one must be able to give one's wri...
This Jesus of Nazereth without money and arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caeser, Muhammad and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on matters human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without th...
Approaching the Start of Civil Exams Perhaps I was once a young Chinese scholar approaching the start of civil exams, my mind grown weary and sad from seclusion with books on syntax and poetic style. All that I knew were the mist-covered mountains an...
These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet: 'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!' 'Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E...
Miltons were, on the whole, the most enthusiastic poet followers. A flick through the London telephone directory would yield about four thousand John Miltons, two thousand William Blakes, a thousand or so Samuel Colleridges, five hundred Percy Shelle...
At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for fr...
Indeed, there is something about reading in a restaurant that is borderline romantic. Leaning back in that corner booth, an evocative title in our hands, a stale cup of java in front of us, every so often bolting forward to jot a phrase onto the napk...
