“Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire?
The one nearest the door of course.” George Bernard Shaw
“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.” ~ Louise Bourgeois
“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”
William Blake
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
Sonnet 29
William Shakespeare
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
“No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.”― L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz
“The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.” – Salvador Dali
Video by Ahmad Farag Elyan.
Art by Salvador Dali
Music – Pink Floyd – High Hopes (The Division Bell)
An old man in love is like a flower in winter. – Portuguese proverb
‘A Red, Red Rose’ by Robert Burns, sung by Andy M. Stewart
O my Luve’s like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June; O my Luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly song in tune. As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry: Till a’ the seas gang dry, my love, And the rocks melt wi’ the sun: I will luve thee still, my dear, While the sands o’ life shall run. And fare thee well, my only Luve And fare thee well, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.
Romance, who loves to nod and sing
With drowsy head and folded wing
Among the green leaves as they shake
Far down within some shadowy lake,
To me a painted paroquet
Hath been—most familiar bird—
Taught me my alphabet to say,
To lisp my very earliest word
While in the wild wood I did lie,
A child—with a most knowing eye.
Of late, eternal condor years
So shake the very Heaven on high
With tumult as they thunder by,
I have no time for idle cares
Through gazing on the unquiet sky;
And when an hour with calmer wings
Its down upon my spirit flings,
That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things—
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.
Edgar Allan Poe
Maverick Mist 