top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very circumscribed and not very important heroic age."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Age quotes
"You can only be twice someone's age once."
"Forty-two. His age had astounded him for years, and each time that he had sat so astounded, trying to figure out what had become of the young, slim man in his twenties, a whole additional year slipped by and had to be recorded, a continually growing sum which he could not reconcile with his self-image. He still saw himself, in his mind's eye, as youthful, and when he caught sight of himself in photographs he usually collapsed ... Somebody took my actual physical presence away and substituted this, he had thought from time to time. Oh well, so it went."
"Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance."
"To be happy, we must be true to nature and carry our age along with us."
"Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long."
"Everyone knows that by far the happiest and universally enjoyable age of man is the first. What is there about babies which makes us hug and kiss and fondle them, so that even an enemy would give them help at that age?"
"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."
"The horse stares at its captor, barely remembering the free kicks of youth."
"There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity."
Explore more quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie
"But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the series a recurring series - though not in exact repetition."
"Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the re-creation of tired hours."
"That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been."
"Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life."
"The reason can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does."
"The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time."
"The balance of private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals; but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing else."
"By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made."
"No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded."
bottom of page