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Quotes by Jones Very

As long as man labors for a physical existence, though an act of necessity almost, he is yet natural; it is life, though that of this world, for which he instinctively works.
– Jones Very
Do we wonder then, that, as this momentary petrifaction of the heart goes on, we are every day more and more strangers in this world of love, holding no communion with the Universal Parent, and hoarding up instead of distributing His general gifts?
– Jones Very
From the wrestling of his own soul with the great enemy, comes that depth and mystery which startles us in Hamlet.
– Jones Very
It is not to the softer and more perishable parts of his massy mind, I would direct my attention; but to those veins of a primitive formation, which, now that time has loosened and removed all else, still stand out as the iron frame work of his being.
– Jones Very
IT is pleasing to frequent the places from which the feet of those whom this world calls great have passed away, to see the same groves and streams that they saw, to hear the same sabbath bells, to linger beneath the roof under which they lived, and be shaded by the same tree which shaded them.
– Jones Very
Macbeth is contending with the realities of this world, Hamlet with those of the next.
– Jones Very
Often and often must he have thought, that, to be or not to be forever, was a question, which must be settled; as it is the foundation, and the only foundation upon which we feel that there can rest one thought, one feeling, or one purpose worthy of a human soul.
– Jones Very
Still, still my eye will gaze long fixed on thee, Till I forget that I am called a man, And at thy side fast-rooted seem to be, And the breeze comes my cheek with thine to fan.
– Jones Very
The advance, which the human mind had made towards civilization, prevented Virgil from making a like impression on his own age.
– Jones Very
The main action of all such minds must evidently be as independent of the will as is the life in a plant or a tree; and, as they are but different results of the same great vital energy in nature, we cannot but feel that the works of genius are as much a growth as are the productions of the material world.
– Jones Very
The poets of the present day who would raise the epic song cry out, like Archimedes of old, give us a place to stand on and we will move the world. This is, as we conceive, the true difficulty.
– Jones Very
The simplest conception of the origin and plan of the Iliad must, we think, prove the most correct. It originated, doubtless, in that desire, which every great poet must especially feel, of revealing to his age forms of nobler beauty and heroism than dwell in the minds of those around him.
– Jones Very
The stream of life, - which, in other men, obstructed and at last stationary as the objects that surround it, seems scarcely to deserve the name,- in them rolls ever onward its rich and life-giving waters as if unconscious of the beautiful banks it has overflowed with fertility.
– Jones Very
There is an obvious incongruity in making times so far remote the theatre on which to represent the heroism of a civilized age; and it adds still more to the difficulty, that, although the darklness of fable still invests them, reason will no longer perceive the beings which the infant credulity of man once saw there.
– Jones Very
These are matters of external history. They are indeed prominent objects, often changing and giving a new direction to the current; but they tell us not why it flows onward and will ever flow.
– Jones Very
To the enlarged minds of Virgil's day, the intervwal between the siege of Troy and their own time did not seem wider than it did to those who lived in the time of Homer.
– Jones Very
We feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even with that greatness which made the spots on which it rested hallowed; and until, by our own lives, and by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed us, we feel that union and relationship of the spirit which we seek.
– Jones Very
With other writers, at our very first acquaintance with their thoughts, we recognise our relationship with the swiftness of intuition; but who of us, however familiar he may have been with his writings, has yet caught a glance of Shakspeare's self, so that he could in any way identify himself with him, and feel himself a sharer in his joys and sorrows, his motives and his life?
– Jones Very