Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Emily Dickinson

1830 – 1886 CE

Though now considered one of the greatest figures in American literature and one of the most important poets, only a few of Dickson’s poems were published during her lifetime and those were significantly edited and changed by publishers. Her first collection wasn’t printed until years after her death and a complete collection wasn’t published until 1955. A serious student of botany, she made and maintained a vast collection of plants; highly introverted, creative, unique, and challenging the assumptions of her time; she seldom left her house but wrote 40 volumes of almost 1800 poems.

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Quotes by Emily Dickinson (17 quotes)

“Inebriate of air – am I – and Debauchee of Dew.”

Chapters: 3. Weak Wishes, Strong Bones

Themes: Sacred World

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“Dwell in possibility.”

Chapters: 1. The Unnamed

Themes: Openness

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“How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog. To tell your name the livelong day, To an admiring bog!”

Chapters: 70. Inscrutable

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“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn't care about careers,
And exigencies never fears.”

Chapters: 72. Helpful Fear

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“I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.”

Chapters: 12. This Over That

Themes: Egolessness

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“If I can stop one heart from breaking, if I can ease one life the aching, I shall not live in vain.”

Chapters: 67. Three Treasures

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“Pardon My Sanity In A World Insane.”

Chapters: 18. The Sick Society

Themes: Crazy Wisdom

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“Saying nothing sometimes says the most.”

Chapters: 70. Inscrutable

Themes: Less is More

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“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.”

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

Themes: Death and Dying

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“to find that phosphorescence, that light within, that's the genius behind poetry.”

Chapters: 24. Unnecessary Baggage

Themes: Poetry

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“To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”

Chapters: 25. The Mother of All Things

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“We turn not older with years but newer every day.”

Chapters: 76. The Soft and Flexible

Themes: Old Age

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“Anger as soon as fed is dead
'Tis starving makes it fat.”

Themes: Anger

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“Time is a Test of Trouble
But not a Remedy
If such it prove, it prove too
There was no Malady.”

Themes: Obstacles Time

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“Fame is a bee
It has a song -
It has a sting -
Ah, too, it has a wing.”

Themes: Fame

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“Beauty—be not caused—It Is
Chase it, and it ceases
Chase it not, and it abides”

Themes: Wu Wei Beauty

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“'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul –
... Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.”

Themes: Hope

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Quotes about Emily Dickinson (2 quotes)

“What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him.”

J. D. Salinger 1919 – 2010 CE
from Franny and Zooey​

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“Sappho is a great poet because she is a lesbian, which gives her erotic access to the Muse. Sappho and the homosexual-tending Emily Dickinson stand alone above women poets, because poetry's mystical energies are ruled by a hierarch requiring the sexual subordination of her petitioners. Women have achieved more as novelists than as poets because the social novel operates outside the ancient marriage of myth and eroticism.”

Camille Paglia 1947 CE –
Fearless and insightful status quo critic
from Sexual Personae (1990)

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