"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Jorge Luis Borges in "A History of Eternity" as translated in Selected Non-Fictions Vol. 1, (1999), edited by Eliot Weinberger
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Keats
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
John Keats
John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets of the English Romantic movement.
164 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by John Keats →
Related Quotes
"And should have been most happy, – but I saw Too far into the sea, where every maw The greater on the less feeds ever…"
"Still do I that most fierce destruction see, — The Shark at savage prey — the hawk at pounce, — The gentle Robin, lik…"
"Call the world if you please "The vale of soul-making.""
"Sweet are the pleasures that to verse belong, And doubly sweet a brotherhood in song."
"My spirit is too weak — mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin'd pinnacle and steep Of …"
"In drear-nighted December, Too happy, happy tree, Thy branches ne'er remember Their green felicity."
"It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand Caverns, till…"
"But were there ever any Writh'd not of passed joy? The feel of not to feel it, When there is none to heal it, Nor num…"
"When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain, Before high piled books, in char…"
"I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination — what the imaginatio…"