Oh, you who read some song that I have sung,
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung?
Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud
His secret thought unto the listening crowd?
Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore:
You have its shape, its color and no more.
It tells not one of those vast mysteries
That lie beneath the surface of the seas.
Our songs are shells, cast out by-waves of thought;
Here, take them at your pleasure; but think not
You’ve seen beneath the surface of the waves,
Where lie our shipwrecks and our coral caves.Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) American author and poet.
Poems of Passion, Epigraph (1883)
(Source)
Quotations about:
private life
Note not all quotations have been tagged, so Search may find additional quotes on this topic.
We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the character of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearances in public; it is from their careless conversation, their half-finished sentences that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real character.
Individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness.
Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) French writer, diplomat, politician
Democracy in America, 2.2.2 (1840) [tr. Reeve & Bowen (1862)]
The holiest of holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows.
