It plainly makes men sad to think. Hence pensiveness is akin to sadness.Pensive means thoughtful, sober, or sad. It is derived from French penser, to think. Milton wrote verses contrasting the sad, thoughtful man (Il Penseroso) and the cheerful, giddy man (L'Allegro). Il Penseroso would be a good blog name.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Friday, September 23, 2005
Thought
Henry David Thoreau, Journal (August 18, 1851):