Bards Quotes
More Bards Quotes
The will is free; Strong is the soul, and wise, and beautiful; The seeds of god-like power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes, if we will!
Matthew Arnold— "Written in Emerson's Essays" (1849).
Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Self-Reliance", in Essays and English Traits (1841)
How have you left the ancient love That bards of old enjoyed in you! The sound is forced, the notes are few!
william blake— 1783 Poetical Sketches,'To The Muses'.
I paint the cot, As truth will paint it, and as bards will not.
George Crabbe— 1783 The Village, bk.1, l.53-4.
How have you left the ancient loveThat bards of old enjoyed in you!The languid strings do scarcely move!The sound is forced, the notes are few!
william blake— To the Muses, st. 4
Olympian bards who sungDivine Ideas below,Which always find us young,And always keep us so.
ralph waldo emerson— Ode to Beauty, st. 2
Olympian bards who sungDivine ideas below,Which always find us youngAnd always keep us so.
ralph waldo emerson— Ode to Beauty
Though all the bards of earth were dead,And all their music passed away,What Nature wishes should be saidShe’ll find the rightful voice to say.
william winter— The golden Silence, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
What is the end of Fame? 'tis but to fill A certain portion of uncertain paper: Some liken it to climbing up a hill, Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapour: For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill, And bards burn what they call their "midnight taper," To have, when the original is dust, A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.
lord byron— Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818-24), Canto I, Stanza 218.
And so they lived many happy years, and the promised tasks were accomplished. Yet long afterward, when all had passed away into distant memory, there were many who wondered whether King Taran, Queen Eilonwy, and their companions had indeed walked the earth, or whether they had been no more than dreams in a tale set down to beguile children. And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.
lloyd alexander— Chapter 21 (closing words)
The Eighth Commandment was not made for bards.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge— "The Reproof and Reply" (1823); the eighth commandment is "Thou shalt not steal".
O black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How, in your darkness, did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrels' lyre?
james weldon johnson— O Black and Unknown Bards, st. 1
Not from the grand old masters, Not from the bards sublime, Whose distant footsteps echo Through the corridors of Time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow— St. 5 (The Day is Done (1845))
Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so.
ralph waldo emerson— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ode to Beauty
The way was long, the wind was cold, The Minstrel was infirm and old; His withered cheek, and tresses grey, Seemed to have known a better day; The harp, his sole remaining joy, Was carried byan orphan boy, The last of all the bards was he, Who sung of Border chivalry.
— 1805 The Lay of the Last Minstrel, introduction.
bards of Passion and of Mirth, Ye have left your souls on earth! Have ye souls in heaven too, Double-lived in regions new?
john keats— "Ode", The Fair Maid of the Inn
Almost his first words were, "Well, let us go and talk with the poets!" In vain I assured this untamed poet that the "bards of San Francisco Bay," whom he had so naively saluted, had taken the vows of neither brotherhood nor sisterhood; that they feasted at no common board; flocked not; discoursed with no beaded rills; neither did their skilled hands sweep any strings whatever, and he must, therefore, listen in vain for the seraphic song.
joaquin miller— Charles Warren Stoddard, on Miller's arrival in San Francisco, in The Poet Of The Sierras, in Overland Monthly Vol. 27 (1896), p. 667.
