Arbitrarily

Famous quotes containing the word arbitrarily:

    History is not a book, arbitrarily divided into chapters, or a drama chopped into separate acts: it has flowed forward. Rome is a continuity, called “eternal.” What has accumulated in this place acts on everyone, day and night, like an extra climate.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)