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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
-Robert Frost
Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? …What is his destiny to him, compared with the shipping interests? …How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds….
-Henry David Thoreau
There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.
-Edgar Allan Poe
There is a special department of Hell for students of probability.
-Bertrand Russell
Just ‘cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.
-George Carlin
“Breakout”
Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration;
the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present;
the words which express what they understand not;
the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire;
the influence which is moved not, but moves.
Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry”
Totem Orcas
But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry… I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. … My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
-Charles Darwin
It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying,
‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’
By then, pigs will be your style.
-Quentin Crisp
I must down to the seas again to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
-John Masefield
He lives in the halflights in secret places, free and alone - this mysterious little great being whom his mistress calls ‘My cat’.
-Margaret Benson
Without freedom, no art;
art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself,
and dies of all others.
-Albert Camus
