Common Ancestor

Famous quotes containing the words common and/or ancestor:

“Poetry, at all times, exercises two distinct functions: it may reveal, it may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things ... or it may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon in themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)

“We rarely quote nowadays to appeal to authority ... though we quote sometimes to display our sapience and erudition. Some authors we quote against. Some we quote not at all, offering them our scrupulous avoidance, and so make them part of our “white mythology.” Other authors we constantly invoke, chanting their names in cerebral rituals of propitiation or ancestor worship.”
—Ihab Hassan (b. 1925)