"With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bells. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature."

Alice Meynell Literature See all quotes by Alice Meynell →

quotekg

React to this quote

More by Alice Meynell

“To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.”

“I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.”

“Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all.”

“Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion.”

“If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.”

“Childhood is but change made gay and visible.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In that strange island Iceland,—burst up, the geologists say, by fire from the bottom of the sea; a wild land of barrenness and lava; swallowed many months of every year in black tempests, yet with a …"

— Thomas Carlyle

Philosophy1795–1881

#time

"Being that soldiers, who overwhelmingly had voted for the SPD in the Bavarian elections in January 1919, had elected Hitler as their representative, that Hitler’s closest companion during the revoluti…"

— Thomas Weber (historian)

Education1969

#politics

"Faction is the greatest evil and the most common danger. "Faction" is the conventional English translation of the Greek stasis, one of the most remarkable words to be found in any language."

— Moses I. Finley

Economics1912–1986

#writing

"ecoming more rational, or not feeling the emotions of social slights, is not part of the human race... not with our current biology. There is no solace to be found from reasoning..."

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Mathematics1960

#philosophy