Witsky

Small doses of wit.

  1. Isn’t it cool that there’s a frozen leopard in Kilimanjaro?
  2. Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind;
  3. Whenever I thought of you I couldn’t help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You made a remark about ‘national character’ that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.
  4. Every boy, he said, has a little sweetheart.
  5. “I’m nobody,” Dickinson says. “Are you nobody, too? / Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell…”
  6. Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
  7. I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries.

  8. It is the pleasant hour when lamps are lit.

    It is the pleasant hour when lamps are lit;
    Calmness and consolation over all;
    The silences so deep that one could hear
    A feather fall.

    It is the hour when the belovèd comes,
    Like to the sweetly soft and low
    Wandering mist upon the breeze,
    Sweetly slow.
    She speaks no word at first—and yet I hark,
    Hark to the soul of her, surprise
    Its gleam and dark,
    And then I kiss her eyes.

    It is the pleasant hour when lamps are lit,
    The vow
    To love each other through the live-long day
    From depths of heart made luminous by it.
    Is with us now.

    And then we speak of simple things;
    The fruit we gathered in the close,
    The flowers that disclose,
    Between the verdant mosses thick,
    Their almost wings;

    And thought does blossom forth once more
    At memory of a word so fair
    Hid in a just remembered drawer,
    In a letter of last year.