For aesthetics is the mother of ethics. Were we to choose our leaders on the basis of their reading experience and not their political programs, there would be much less grief on earth. I believe-not empirically, alas, but only theoretically-that for someone who has read a lot of Dickens to shoot his like in the name of an idea is harder than for someone who has read no Dickens.
quote by Joseph Brodsky
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Related quotes
The Gentlemen of Dickens
The gentlemen of Dickens
Were mostly very poor,
And innocent of grammar,
And of parentage obscure;
But rich or poor or thriving,
Of high or lowly birth,
The gentlemen of Dickens
Were the grandest on the earth.
The gentlemen of Dickens,
They wore no fancy names—
Like Reginald or Percy
Fitzgerald or FitzJames;
But names for fools to laugh at,
That sound like hob-nailed boots,
Like Newman Noggs and Knubbles,
Toodles and Mr Toots.
They’d little save their kindness,
Their honesty and truth;
They mostly came embarrassed,
And stammering and uncouth;
But the gentlemen of Dickens,
Their women and their girls,
Could speak their minds if need be
To ladies and to earls.
But one who wore a title
A lesson, too, could teach:
Lord Feenix—Cousin Feenix
Of wandering legs and speech.
O he might teach a lesson
A gentleman could give,
Where he stands by his “lovely
And accomplished relative”.
The gentlemen of Dickens
Were gamblers now and then
(And looked upon the ladies,
No doubt, like other men);
And some of them were drunkards,
It cannot be denied;
But one washed all their sins away
When Sidney Carton died.
The gentlemen of Dickens
Are round us here to-day,
For their self-sacrificing
Brave spirits live for aye.
They cheer my heart and lift it,
They set my blood aglow,
For I was once a gentleman,
Though it was years ago.
poem by Henry Lawson
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Rest To Read
Read any...
Any thing read...
Read...
Day with night...
Read...
Reading is
Happy...
Reading
Is boor...
Reading
Is Knolage...
Read...
Reading is
One of body
Rest...
Rest is
One of the reading
Time...
Read daily
Take rest daily
poem by Otteri Selvakumar
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A Love To Read
Is it a misconception,
That writers read...
Other writers' works?
Or reads extensively at all?
Afterall...
When would a true writer,
Find time to get that done...
If one has a love to read?
And...
I am not that one to say,
A reading AND a writing done...
Is an impossibility.
Because I read what I write often.
Regularly and on a daily basis.
poem by Lawrence S. Pertillar
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I hated to read. My mother could not get me to read. I'm going through the same thing with my daughter now. I love to read now, but I don't remember reading.
quote by Dorothy Hamill
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Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.
Charles Dickens in Great Expectations
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An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
quote by Charles Dickens
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I heard Thackeray thank Heaven for the purity of Dickens. I thanked Heaven for the purity of a greater than Dickens - Thackeray himself.
quote by Goldwin Smith
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Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
quote by Angela Carter
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If you want to study writing, read Dickens. That's how to study writing, or Faulkner, or D.H. Lawrence, or John Keats. They can teach you everything you need to know about writing.
quote by Shelby Foote
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My little book
blind as I was, deaf as my friend yet! have
gone as furthest as the universe, I thought
that was only a great dream of my past
laughing me seems to easy, for once I was
a little child is always a child, it was the day
where my father and mother hold me so tight,
closing my bulging eyes as they read, telling
some fabulous stories and then gradually falls
my attentive ears down to my sight and there
no more
all comes to meet my fantastic imagination,
making my childhood memories filled it all, with
what is all remembered is not what it makes, for
what ever is heard now has gone as it is done
books tells me different stories, that relates my
ways, for I taste of what is the past and today, simply
I know that hearing is not reading and reading is
always remembering
my little book paved me the way that in my little
room I will be free....read and read and read...the
only way to visit and see, of what is yesterday for
the future belongs today.....and reading always
become part of me
poem by Antonio Liao
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I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
quote by Charles Dickens
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I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honestly out of countenance any day of the week, if there is anything to get got by it.
quote by Charles Dickens
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If I Only Had A Little More Time.
Dear sir, will you read and comment on my poem?
I think if I have time to with so many request most of the time I just read poems as a see them on the website.
Can we do that instead.
Or how how I browse all your poems and pick one that catches my eye?
Why can't I choose when I have the time?
Its not that I don't like these authors I really do.
I would read everyone they wrote given a chance.
But my goodness I work 12 hrs out of the day usually.
And if not working I'm either helping friend repair his home from the flood, or building another computer from old junk computers, or I'm writing.
Can you see how I have a hard time fitting that in always on a constant basis?
poem by Ace Of Black Hearts
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I read a book
I read a book
Not to enhance my looks
I read a book
Maybe to avoid being a crook
I read a book
Not just to learn how to cook
I read a book
To ascertain how to defend my rights
Not just to acquire knowledge
Reading a book I pledge,
Is one of the roads to the light
I read a book
To understand how a kings territory
Is defended with pieces such as the rook
I read a book
So there will be no questions asked
When I count correctly what you took
I read a book
So that I play not ignorant
Now on life I’ve a different outlook
I read a book
So if I come up with all the right answers
I will know for sure it is not merely a fluke
Copyright 2006 - Sylvia Chidi
poem by Sylvia Chidi
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Crossing the Atlantic
We sail out of season into on oyster-gray wind,
over a terrible hardness.
Where Dickens crossed with mal de mer
in twenty weeks or twenty days
I cross toward him in five.
Wraped in robes-
not like Caesar but like liver with bacon-
I rest on the stern
burning my mouth with a wind-hot ash,
watching my ship
bypass the swells
as easily as an old woman reads a palm.
I think; as I look North, that a field of mules
lay down to die.
The ship is 27 hours out.
I have entered her.
She might be a whale,
sleeping 2000 and ship's company,
the last 40¢ martini
and steel staterooms where night goes on forever.
Being inside them is, I think,
the way one would dig into a planet
and forget the word light.
I have walked cities,
miles of mole alleys with carpets.
Inside I have been ten girls who speak French.
They languish everywhere like bedsheets.
Oh my Atlantic of the cracked shores,
those blemished gates of Rockport and Boothbay,
those harbor smells like the innards of animals!
Old childish Queen, where did you go,
you bayer at wharfs and Victorian houses?
I have read each page of my mother's voyage.
I have read each page of her mother's voyage.
I have learned their words as they learned Dickens'.
I have swallowed these words like bullets.
But I have forgotten the last guest-terror.
Unlike them, I cannot toss in the cabin
as in childbirth.
Now always leaving me in the West
is the wake,
a ragged bridal veil, unexplained,
seductive, always rushing down the stairs,
never detained, never enough.
The ship goes on
as though nothing else were happening.
Generation after generation,
I go her way.
She will run East, knot by knot, over an old bloodstream,
stripping it clear,
each hour ripping it, pounding, pounding,
forcing through as through a virgin.
Oh she is so quick!
This dead street never stops!
poem by Anne Sexton
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A Victorian Superstar
A literary genius was born this day
Charles John Huffam Dickens was he
two hundred years ago in 1812
he wrote great classics like Nicholas Nickleby.
Writing by candlelight using quill and ink
he created stories that will never end
great characters like Oliver Twist and Scrooge
and novels such as Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.
On his shoulder perched Grip his pet Raven
at his feet his dog Timber Doodle would sit
as Dickens wrote for hours and hours
about the exploits of Edwin Drood and Martin Chuzzlewit.
If he was alive today he'd be bigger than Elvis
then again he was way ahead of his time
living in the harsh Victorian era
he would write about corruption, poverty, and crime.
He liked to give his characters wacky names
inspired by people on the streets and in the pub
like Jerry Cruncher, Mr Fang, Horatio Fizkin,
Toby Crackit, Mrs Spittletoes, and Gabriel Grub.
So happy birthday Mr Dickens and many thanks
for your great books and characters full of fun
these novels are still being enjoyed today
so long live A Christmas Carol and Dombey and Son.
Charles Dickens born 7th of February 1812.
poem by Kevin Halls
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To Read And Read Again
TO READ AND READ AGAIN
To read and to read again
And to be left empty
By the abundance of words
Whose meanings multiplication
Erases all sense
Of their coherence
And our understanding.
To read and read again
As if in this pretence of learning
Salvation will come
To read and read again
And be forever dumb.
.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I'm Not Like You
I sit here now,
Writing this poem.
You read it now,
No matter what’s goin.
Sometimes it’s rainy,
Sometimes it’s not.
You read this poem now,
Go do you the homework you forgot.
Life can be simple,
It can also be complicated.
Be when read this now,
Please don’t get frustrated.
Thanks for reading this,
You’re a cool person that much is true.
But to spend the time and read,
I’m probably not much like you.
Some of you read with me 40 years ago a portion of Aristotle's Ethics, a selection of passages that describe his idea of happiness. You may not remember too well.
quote by Charles Van Doren
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There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
quote by Charles Dickens
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