Muse Quotes (10 quotes)
“You know that it is quite preposterous of you to chase rainbows,” said the sane person to the
poet.
“Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one,” mused the poet.
“Yet it would be rather beautiful if I did one day manage to catch one,” mused the poet.
'Dreams' in Little Stings (1907, 1908), 59.
By firm immutable immortal laws Impress’d on Nature by the GREAT FIRST CAUSE,
Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.
Say, MUSE! how rose from elemental strife
Organic forms, and kindled into life;
How Love and Sympathy with potent charm
Warm the cold heart, the lifted hand disarm;
Allure with pleasures, and alarm with pains,
And bind Society in golden chains.
From 'Production of Life', The Temple of Nature; or, The Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes (1803), 3, Canto I, lines 1-8.
Come celebrate with me in song the nameOf Newton, to the Muses dear, for he
Unlocked the hidden treasures of truth …
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.
Unlocked the hidden treasures of truth …
Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.
From final verse of his much longer 'Ode to Newton'. As translated from the Latin of the version in the first edition, by Leon J. Richardson. In Isaac Newton, Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World: Newton’s Principia: Motte’s Translation Revised (1934, 2022), xv. The Ode was prefaced to all three editions of Isaac Newton’s Principia, which Halley funded, edited and oversaw for its printing.
No video, no photographs, no verbal descriptions, no lectures can provide the enchantment that a few minutes out-of-doors can: watch a spider construct a web; observe a caterpillar systematically ravaging the edge of a leaf; close your eyes, cup your hands behind your ears, and listen to aspen leaves rustle or a stream muse about its pools and eddies. Nothing can replace plucking a cluster of pine needles and rolling them in your fingers to feel how they’re put together, or discovering that “sedges have edges and grasses are round,” The firsthand, right-and-left-brain experience of being in the out-of-doors involves all the senses including some we’ve forgotten about, like smelling water a mile away. No teacher, no student, can help but sense and absorb the larger ecological rhythms at work here, and the intertwining of intricate, varied and complex strands that characterize a rich, healthy natural world.
Into the Field: A Guide to Locally Focused Teaching
O for the Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention…
The brightest heaven of invention…
Henry V, Prologue. In Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain (1986), 262.
On poetry and geometric truth,
And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,
I mused; upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,
Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
And their high privilege of lasting life,
From all internal injury exempt,
I mused; upon these chiefly: and at length,
My senses yielding to the sultry air,
Sleep seized me, and I passed into a dream.
From 'The Prelude' in Book 5, collected in Henry Reed (ed.), The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (1851), 497.
Sauntering silently among the healthful groves, concerning yourself about every thing worthy a wise and good man?
— Horace
Epistle IV, to Albius Tibullus, translated by Christopher Smart in The Works of Horace (1861), 237. Also seen translated as, “To linger silently among the healthful woods, musing on such things as are worthy of a wise and good man.”
Stay your rude steps, or e’er your feet invade
The Muses’ haunts,ye sons of War and Trade!
Nor you, ye legion fiends of Church and Law,
Pollute these pages with unhallow’d paw!
Debased, corrupted, grovelling, and confin’d,
No definitions touch your senseless mind;
To you no Postulates prefer their claim,
No ardent Axioms your dull souls inflame;
For you no Tangents touch, no Angles meet,
No Circles join in osculation sweet!
The Muses’ haunts,ye sons of War and Trade!
Nor you, ye legion fiends of Church and Law,
Pollute these pages with unhallow’d paw!
Debased, corrupted, grovelling, and confin’d,
No definitions touch your senseless mind;
To you no Postulates prefer their claim,
No ardent Axioms your dull souls inflame;
For you no Tangents touch, no Angles meet,
No Circles join in osculation sweet!
From poem, with co-authors John Hookham Frere, George Canning and George Ellis, The Loves of the Triangles: A Mathematical and Philosophical Poem, Canto I, collected in Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin (1854), 124.
Tell me these things, Olympian Muses, tell
From the beginning, which first came to be?
Chaos was first of all, but next appeared
Broad-bosomed Earth, Sure standing-place for all
The gods who live on snowy Olympus' peak,
And misty Tartarus, in a recess
Of broad-pathed earth, and Love, most beautiful
Of all the deathless gods. He makes men weak,
He overpowers the clever mind, and tames
The spirit in the breasts of men and gods.
From Chaos came black Night and Erebos.
And Night in turn gave birth to Day and Space
Whom she conceived in love to Erebos.
And Earth bore starry Heaven, first, to be
An equal to herself, to cover her
All over, and to be a resting-place,
Always secure, for all the blessed gods.Theogony, I. 114-28.
From the beginning, which first came to be?
Chaos was first of all, but next appeared
Broad-bosomed Earth, Sure standing-place for all
The gods who live on snowy Olympus' peak,
And misty Tartarus, in a recess
Of broad-pathed earth, and Love, most beautiful
Of all the deathless gods. He makes men weak,
He overpowers the clever mind, and tames
The spirit in the breasts of men and gods.
From Chaos came black Night and Erebos.
And Night in turn gave birth to Day and Space
Whom she conceived in love to Erebos.
And Earth bore starry Heaven, first, to be
An equal to herself, to cover her
All over, and to be a resting-place,
Always secure, for all the blessed gods.Theogony, I. 114-28.
— Heslod
In Hesiod and Theognis, trans. Dorothea Wender (1973), 26-7.
Why may we not add Geology to the list of poetical sciences? Why shall not that science, which is the second science in eras and magnitudes, and the first, in affording scope for the imagination, be brought into favor with the Muses and afford themes for the Poet?
In 'The Poetry of Geology', The Indicator, 1849, 109.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
