Lycidas Quotes

Allein zu sein ist nicht schlecht, wenn man in der Gesellschaft von Büchern ist.

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

Die Welt ist gierig, und manchmal verschwinden Menschen in ihrem Schlund, ohne jemals wieder gesehen zu werden.

Die Welt ist gierig, und manchmal verschlingt sie kleine Kinder mit Haut und Haaren.

Die wichtigste Stunde ist immer die Gegenwart, der bedeutendste Mensch der, der einem gerade gegenübersteht, und das notwendigste Werk ist immer die Liebe.

Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom...

Machtgier, Geltungsdrang und Habsucht”, sagte Maurice Micklewhite, “sind die Götter der neuen Zeit. Die Menschen huldigen den Dingen. Sie verehren die Götter der Zivilisation. Sie verkaufen ihre Seelen an die dunklen Träume von Reichtum und Macht. Die alten Götter nannten Tugenden ihr Eigen. Mitgefühl. Warmherzigkeit. Toleranz. Doch glaubt niemand mehr an die alten Götter, die den Menschen einst gezeigt haben, was Menschsein bedeutet.

Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek.

He did. He researched her. Someone told him that she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in Beard’s college who owed him a favor (for procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read “Comus” and was astounded by its silliness. He read through “Lycidas,” “Samson Agonistes,” and “Il Penseroso”— stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with “Paradise Lost” and, like many before him, preferred Satan’s party to God’s. He, Beard, that is, memorized passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays that he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of “Paradise Lost.” He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term’s money on an eighteenth-century edition of “Areopagitica.” When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape.

It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life - in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience - we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we're still looking for the old one. And of course we don't get that. You can't, at the twentieth reading, get again the experience of reading Lycidas for the first time. But what you do get can be in its own way as good.

Die Angst tötet das Vertrauen. Angst lässt uns nicht im Jetzt, sondern im Vielleicht leben.

—Weep no more, Comyn said. —Go on then, Talbot. —And the story, sir? —After, Stephen said. Go on, Talbot. A swarthy boy opened a book and propped it nimbly under the breastwork of his satchel. He recited jerks of verse with odd glances at the text: —Weep no more, woful shepherds, weep no more For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor...

Wir müssen lernen, uns an der Gegenwart zu erfreuen. Dadurch, dass wir fortwährend innere Zwiesprache halten, die Erfahrungen der Vergangenheit und die Erwartungen an die Zukunft aufeinander prallen, verpassen wir oftmals die Gegenwart.

Bél. What is the meaning of this Eh? and what is there surprising in what I say? One is handsome enough, I imagine, to be able to say that it is not one heart only which is subject to our empire; and Dorante, Damis, Cléonte, and Lycidas may show that we have some charms. Ar. These gentlemen love you? Bél. Yes, with all their might. Ar. They have told you so? Bél. No one has taken that liberty; they have so well known to reverence me up to this day, that they never breathed a word of their love. But to offer me their hearts and to devote themselves to my services, dumb interpreters have sufficiently done their office. Ar. We hardly ever see Damis come into the house.

John Milton’s Lycidas—

Wir können den Augenblick nicht genießen, wenn wir uns vor der Zukunft fürchten.

Fame is not really real,” he said, a statement that he would echo many times. “Nobody is real except the people we're close to.” He cited a passage from Milton’s lyric poem, “Lycidas”:

To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.