Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Wallace StevensRead
Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the juxtaposition of religious themes with the natural celebration of spring, suggesting it limits the true essence of the season.
Wallace Stevens' quote reflects on the incompatibility between religious expressions associated with Easter and the natural, instinctive joy of springtime. He posits that trying to impose a religious framework onto a season that inherently symbolizes renewal and vitality undermines the authentic human experience tied to nature's cyclical patterns.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about how holiday traditions can sometimes overshadow natural celebrations.
Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.
Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.
Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
LIGHT FROM WITHIN my friend, cancer got you damn it: you had it beat for seven years at least. how did it come back? Why all that pain. again. and you, such a fighter you fought me over and over with tears and words and promises. you fought for me with honesty and a light so bright it hurts my heart. sweet lorna. at peace now finally no more battles, just light from within a flickering candle in the dark burns with you.
Compare the silent rose of the sun And rain, the blood-rose living in its smell, With this paper, this dust. That states the point.
To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.
The only standard we have for judging all of our social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements as just or unjust, as good or bad, as better or worse, derives from our conception of the good life for man on earth, and from our conviction that, given certain external conditions, it is possible for men to make good lives for themselves by their own efforts.
Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.
When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren't even considered human.
The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled.
The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this capacity, which nonviolence must recover.
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