Alice Meynell Quotes

There is something very cheerful and courageous in the setting out of a child on a journey of speech with so small baggage and with so much confidence.

For you knew not it was I,
And I knew not it was you.
We have learnt, as days went by.
But a flower struck root and grew
Underground, and no one knew.

[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song.

Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the act.

Women might be, and were, duly suppressed when, by the mouth of Olympe de Gouges, they claimed a "right to concur in the choice of representatives for the formation of the laws"; but in her person, too, they were liberally allowed to bear political responsibility to the Republic. Olympe de Gouges was guillotined. Robespierre thus made her public and complete amends.

I make the whole world answer to my art.

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.

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.

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired.[…] The leg is the best part of the figure,[…] and the best leg is the man's.[…] But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid.

A child is beset with long traditions. And his infancy is so old, so old, that the mere adding of years in the life to follow will not seem to throw it back—it is already so far.

O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God's side even of such a simple thing?

Now, in our opinion, no author should be blamed for obscurity; nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry.

[T]here is something graver than to be immortal, and that is to be mortal.

But, visiting Sea, your love doth press And reach in further than you know, And fills all these, and when you go,
There's loneliness in loneliness.

[W]hat is now and then attempted is perhaps "for art's sake." He that saveth his art shall lose it.