Charm Quotes - page 19
Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just, and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form.
Plato
He embodies a peculiarly American archetype -- the Good Bad Boy -- who perseveres, with charm, despite life's vicissitudes and his own defects. Driven by dreams of a better future, he refers frequently to the past and his fallen brothers -- often to good political effect, but without seeming manipulative, perhaps because so much of his personal memory is our public memory. "Don't you think," says former Kennedy press secretary Bob Shrum, "that the country has a very complicated set of feelings about him and his family?" 'He has all the makings of a tragic figure, yet refuses to play the part. Instead he insists on center stage, voice ever louder, gestures ever grander, resolutely imperfect, a flawed and final prince.
Ted Kennedy
If, from the idea of motherland, you take away covetousness, hatred, envy and vainglory; if you take away from it the desire for predominance by violence, what is there left of it?
It is not an individual unity of laws; for just laws have no colors. It is not a solidarity of interests, for there are no material national interests - or they are not honest. It is not a unity of race; for the map of the countries is not the map of the races. What is there left?
There is left a restricted communion, deep and delightful; the affectionate and affecting attraction in the charm of a language - there is hardly more in the universe besides its languages which are foreigners - there is left a personal and delicate preference for certain forms of landscape, of monuments, of talent. And even this radiance has its limits. The cult of the masterpieces of art and thought is the only impulse of the soul which, by general consent, has always soared above patriotic littlenesses.
Henri Barbusse
'Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines!
Which were so richly spun, and woven so sit,
As, since she will vouchsafe no other wit.
Ben Jonson