Famous quotes containing the words test, public and/or void:
“The face we see was never young,
Nor could it ever have been old.
For he, to whom we had applied
Our shopman’s test of age and worth,
Was elemental when he died,
As he was ancient at his birth:”
—Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)
“The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)