EVERFRESH QUOTES

 

                EVERFRESH  QUOTES

            We are born in a world of conflicts, differences, injustice, inequalities, good and evil, belief and disbelief, love and hatred, high and low, truth and falsehood, greed and contentment, godliness and ungodliness.

            There is a lot of convincing truth in religious texts yet they become bones of contention.

            However, there are great poets whose ideas are universal as well as eternal.

            Here are some quotes from such poets for your objective study. You are not bound to accept them as they are stated. Feel free to disagree if you think you should do so.  

* I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us , do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by a Christian example? Why, revenge. --------From Act 3, Sc.1. from the play  of William Shakespeare (!564-1616) The Merchant of Venice.

**  REMEMBER, no men are strange, no countries foreign,

Beneath all uniforms, a single body breathes

Like ours; the land our brothers walk upon

Is earth like this, in which we all shall lie.

 

They, too, aware of sun and air and water,

Are fed by peaceful harvests, by war’s long winter starv’d.

Their hands are ours, and in their lines we read

A labour not different from our own,

 

Remember they have eyes like ours that wake

Or sleep, and strength that can be won

By love. In every land is common life

They all can recognize and understand.  -------From ‘No Men Are Foreign’ written by the English poet James Kirkup (1918-2009).

 

*** The sea of Faith

Was once too, at the full and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another ! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help, nor pains,

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.------From Dover Beach, a poem written by the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88).

 

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G.R. Kanwal

10   November 2026