"There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world."
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Charlotte Brontë on Morality and Convention
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.
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Camus on Depth of Feeling
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
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Sir Richard Livingstone on the Value of History
A man who knows the origins of the world in which he lives, looks at it with more understanding, walks in it with securer and more certain steps; he is less intimidated by words, for he knows their history, less inclined to either excessive respect or contempt for existing institutions, for he sees how they came to be there. He understands the world better, as parents understand a child whom they have known from its cradle better than a stranger understands him, and he is more confident and capable in handling it.
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Vendler on Literature
Literature not only allows but encourages the interpenetration of the senses, the imagination, and the intellect — the "whole person," as we might say — in a way that our everyday texts (the advertisement, the obituary, the brochure from the computer company) do not. This integration of all the faculties of human nature at once, presented in a poem, becomes, as we internalize the poem, an integration of ourselves within ourselves.