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Alice Meynell

94 quotes

“There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is a look of human eyes that tells of perpetual loneliness, so there is also the familiar look that is the sign of perpetual crowds.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In childhood we all have a more exalted sense of dawn and summer sunrise than we ever fully retain or quite recover; and also a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings—a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he foot should have more of the acquaintance of earth, and know more of flowers, freshness, cool brooks, wild thyme, and salt sand than does anything else about us.[…] It is only the entirely unshod that have lively feet.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]or man, woman, and child the tender, irregular, sensitive, living foot, which does not even stand with all its little surface on the ground, and which makes no base to satisfy an architectural eye, is, as it were, the unexpected thing.[…] How weak it is may be seen from a footprint: for nothing makes a more helpless and unsymmetrical sign than does a naked foot.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Tender, too, is the silence of human feet. You have but to pass a season amongst the barefooted to find that man, who, shod, makes so much ado, is naturally as silent as snow. Woman, who not only makes her armed heel heard, but also goes rustling like a shower, is naturally silent as snow.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To mount a hill is to lift with you something lighter and brighter than yourself or than any meaner burden. You lift the world, you raise the horizon; you give a signal for the distance to stand up.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here is nothing so exacting, so difficult, so various, as the consistency of a complete theory, nothing so overwhelming to a slothful student.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t is doubtful whether we may name any weak thing as typically spiritual.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Surely there is but one assumption […] wherewith nearly all thinkers […] have done their work—that is, the confession of the moral law: that there is a good, and that pure cruelty, mere hatred, and ingratitude, for example, are contrary thereto.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She walks—the lady of my delight— A shepherdess of sheep. Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white; She guards them from the steep; She feeds them on the fragrant height, And folds them in for sleep.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight And go with the hour.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Flocks of the memories of the day draw near The dovecote doors of sleep.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children appeal to us by a variant of the quality of pathos.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not extravagance, it is not excitement, it is not excess, or dizziness, or delirium, that chastises habitual pleasure in art, but only dullness.[…] One of the Latin races, having the dullness and keeping wit enough to name it, has the word for it—banalité.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A]n English wit has well said that affectation displeases us because it has not too much, but too little, art.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]t would be a pity if laughter should ever become, like rhetoric and the arts, a habit.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he sense of humour has other things to do than to make itself conspicuous in the act of laughter.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A wall is the safeguard of simplicity.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sense of art mixes with our modern piety. We are apt to admire the evangelical reticence for its dignity,[…] we are apt to respect the Scripture narratives with their few intense details, their close events and their great omissions alike, for their simplicity, and—it is to be feared that our literature leads us so far—for their "effect.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake." He that saveth his art shall lose it.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The travelling heart went free With endless streams; that strife was stopped; And down a thousand vales I dropped, I flowed to Italy.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thou inmost, ultimate Council of judgment, palace of decrees Where the high senses hold their spiritual state, Sued by earth's embassies, And sign, approve, accept, conceive, create.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With this ambiguous earth His dealings have been told us. These abide: The signal to a maid, the human birth, The lesson, and the young Man crucified.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But in the eternities, Doubtless we shall compare together, hear A million alien Gospels, in what guise He trod the Pleiades, the Lyre, the Bear.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is for fear of the grown-up, or at least out of respect towards them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. "Who is to care if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous.[…] For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said "Of course not—only I liked the stories." Fiction to children is fiction and not fact.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere?”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as children are they would yet find so many things at table to be detestable.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]xaggeration establishes no good understanding between the reader and the author. It is a solemn appeal to our credulity, and we are right to resent it. It is the violence of a weakling hand—the worst manner of violence.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised and appropriate word.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[S]ome things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most beautiful of all gardens is assuredly not that which is rather forest or field than garden, the 'landscape garden' of false taste; nor, on the other hand, the shaven and trimmed and weeded parterre with an unstarred lawn; but rather the garden long ago strictly planned, rigidly ordered, architecturally piled, smooth and delicate, but later set free, given over to time and the sun; not a wilderness, but having an enclosed wilderness, a directed liberty, a designed magnificence and excess.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My day-mind can endure Upright, in hope, all it must undergo. But O, afraid, unsure, My night-mind waking lies too low, too low.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Round the blue sea I love the best The argent foam played, slender, fleet; I saw—past Wordsworth and the rest— Her natural, Greek, and silver feet.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes Never saw Rome before.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the case of women, it is of the living and unpublished blood that the violent world has professed to be delicate and ashamed. See the curious history of the political rights of women under the Revolution. On the scaffold she enjoyed an ungrudged share in the fortunes of party. Political life might be denied her, but that seems a trifle when you consider how generously she was permitted political death. She was to spin and cook for her citizen in the obscurity of her living hours; but to the hour of her death was granted a part in the largest interests, social, national, international. The blood wherewith she should, according to Robespierre, have blushed to be seen or heard in the tribune, was exposed in the public sight unsheltered by her veins.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The smoke of a cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand—and that is not a Hindu hand, nor any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the section of a sea-wave—its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a single moment, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room fluctuates in twenty delicate directions.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mothers of all ages are those who have suffered because others suffered; for each of them, self is less sensitive than the sense of her child. Self is not locked up in the maternal heart, there to be cherished, as it is by the egoist, or to be crushed and silenced, as it is by the Saint. In the mother, self is not lost, but loses all its evil by the passionate personal love that distributes it among sons and daughters. Perfect self-less love would perhaps be distributed through the multitude, but a mother is not perfect: nature has so much use for her—separate, family use—that she cannot let her go free from irrational, indispensable partialities and limitings, even injustices, all serving the turn of the race.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pretty game of calling on the children of the audience of "Peter Pan" to declare their faith in fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J. Barrie has written the most adorable "pretending" story ever written about a child.)No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put aside while they "pretend." That is their own word.[…] "Let's pretend," not "Let's believe." Their mother does not put "Let's pretend" into the child's mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception.”
Alice Meynell (1847–1922) said by 1922 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source