“Is it possible there are more things, Horatio, than this world dreams of?”
From Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act I.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“He was not about to allow an apparition to deflect him from his appointed course.”
The U S Postal Code:
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
And from Herodotus, (485-425), Histories writing of the Persians; (trans. A.D. Godley, 1924):
“It is said that as many days as there are in the whole journey, so many are the men and horses that stand along the road, each horse and man at the interval of a day’s journey; and these are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing their appointed course with all speed.”
“By the time of the events recounted here [nuclear weapons] had increased … in landscapes plotted and pieced—fold, fallow…”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things….
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;…
Concerning oxymoronic military/poets: “…Simply that they hear a different drum.”
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:
“If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”
“Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets…”
Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, scene 1:
…infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets:
More needs she the divine than the physician.
“winter of his discontent”
Shakespeare. Richard III, Act I
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
“Dharma bum.”
From the novel of that title by Jack Kerouac.
“But now, the blast of war blown in their ears, they were like tigers, pacing, ready.”
Shakespeare, Henry V, Act III, Scene 1.
But when the blast of war blows in our ears
Then imitate the action of the tiger
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood….
“…He walked in halls fit for princes and thousands at his bidding speed.”
Milton, On His Blindness
…God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his milde yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest.
They also serve who only stand and wait.
“How low, how little are the proud, how indigent the great.”
Thomas Gray (1716-71), Ode on the Spring.
“What father would give his child a stone when he asks for bread?”
Luke 11:11 and also Matthew 7:9-10.
“Now there were also people who accepted these horrors as the downside of the best of all possible worlds.”
Voltaire, in Candide, in which Dr. Pangloss asserts that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
(Voltaire’s scathing and sarcastic response to philosopher Gottfried Liebniz’s theodicy on how an omniscient, omnipotent and beneficent God can allow suffering and evil).
“… attention must be paid to these things, attention must be paid.”
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. Act I.
“He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
“… the love that moves the sun and stars”
Dante’s Divine Comedy, the last line of “Paradiso“(and the most beautiful stanza ever written, but you have to read all three cantos to get it):
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stele.
“And a little child shall lead them.”
Isaiah 11:6.
“How to present his true account?”
Milton, On His Blindness.
…though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide….
“…the illusion of insight…”
John Cheever, in Oh, What a Paradise It Seems.
“A doctor of the soul…”
Viktor Frankl, title, Doctor and the Soul; with resonances also of Shakespeare’s, Macbeth, Act V, scene 1.
“The Center would not hold.”
Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919
…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed….
“Of men and arms I sing!”
Virgil: opening lines of The Aeneid
Arma virumque cano (I sing of arms and the man).