Bronowski Quotes

“When Coleridge tried to define beauty, he returned always to one deep thought; beauty, he said, is unity in variety! Science is nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature,—or, more exactly, in the variety of our experience. Poetry, painting, the arts are the same search, in Coleridge’s phrase, for unity in variety.”

“His (Samuel Coleridge) dark senses were constantly in play, the frustration of them bringing illness. Weather and organic nature combined in a synaesthetic multi-media event, and this was the ground of all perception before it was divded up in daily living: the Primary Imagination giving way to the Secondary. Poetry was forever seeking a conscious return to this state, which existed all the time, whether he knew it or not.”

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke - Aye! and what then?”

“If we take care of the inches we will not have to worry about the miles.”

“Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing Should certain persons die before they sing.”

“Alone alone all all alone Alone on a wide wide sea.”

“No man was ever yet a great poet without at the same time being a profound philosopher.”

“A mother is a mother still The holiest thing alive.”

“All thoughts all passions all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed his sacred flame.”

“She is not fair to outward viewAs many maidens be;Her loveliness I never knewUntil she smiled on me.Oh! then I saw her eye was bright,A well of love, a spring of light.”