Famous Quotes

"There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny."

Lascelles Abercrombie on Experience

More quotes about Experience

• "Life can only be understood backwards but it must be lived forwards."

  Soren Kierkegaard on Experience

• "The only source of knowledge is experience."

  Albert Einstein on Experience

• "Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn."

  C. S. Lewis on Experience

• "Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes."

  Oscar Wilde on Experience

• "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

  Mark Twain on Experience

More quotes by Lascelles Abercrombie

• "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."

• "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."

• "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."

• "Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life."

• "But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell."