A Quote by John Burnside

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

John Burnside

Quote Topics

Compassion Essential Far Great Great Pleasure Heroic Humility Mark Moore Mysterious Pleasure Poets Reading Realisation Respect Virtues Wonder

Quote Author

John Burnside
Scottish - Writer
Born: March 19, 1955

There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues madethem great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.

Herman Melville

Even famous poets such as Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were rarely asked to read their poems.

Donald Hall

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

Margo Jefferson

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

Alexander Chee

Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility

John McCain

Respect all manner of men regardless of their station in life. Compassion is one of the greatest virtues.

Anthony Carmona

Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of one man to the virtues of another, the spiritual payment given in exchange for the personal, selfish pleasure which one man derives from the virtues of another man’s character.

Ayn Rand

The three most important virtues are humility, humility, and humility.

Bernard of Clairvaux

The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation. Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

John Berger

Reading-not occasionally, not only on vacation but everyday-gives me nourishment and enlarges my life in mysterious and essential ways.

Mona Simpson

For me, love is an enhanced state of kindness, compassion, service, respect, and humility, an emotion I feel we are all here to give and to receive.

Nathan East

There are two classes of poets - the poets by education and practice, these we respect; and poets by nature, these we love.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poets are mysterious, but a poet when all is said is not much more mysterious than a banker.

Allen Tate

You may be guided by the unending effort of poets and artists, biologists and psychiatrists to describe that irreplaceable and still mysterious emotion so essential to the human condition, but all the search engines in the universe cannot compete with the first kiss.