All one can do is to achieve ...
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If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.
We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.
I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.
Quotes from the same author
The greatest of all human delusions is that there is a tangible goal, and not just direction towards an ideal aim. The idea that a goal can be attained perpetually frustrates human beings, who are disappointed at never getting there, never being able to stop.
Stephen Spender
Although Poets are vain and ambitious, their vanity and ambition are of the purest kind attainable in this world. They are ambitious to be accepted for what they altimately are as revealed in their poetry.
Stephen Spender
So i learned both to accept myself and to aim beyond myself
Stephen Spender
To break out of the chaos of my darkness Into a lucid day is all my will. My words like eyes in night, stare to reach A centre for their light: and my acts thrown To distant places by impatient violence Yet lock together to mould a path of stone Out of my darkness into a lucid day.
Stephen Spender
One type of concentration is immediate and complete, as it was with Mozart. The other is plodding and only completed in stages, as with Beethoven. Thus genius works in different ways to achieve its ends.
Stephen Spender
