Famous quotes containing the word attempt:
“For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... the attempt to control poetry, to subordinate it to extrapoetic ends, constitutes misuse.... it may be poetry’s stubborn quality of rockbottom, intrinsic uselessness which ... constitutes the guarantee of its integrity, and hence of its ultimate value to us.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)
“[The] attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and ... often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)