Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
To write is a humiliation.
Every decision you make is a mistake.
The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.
A strong foe is better than a weak friend.
It takes a long time to understand nothing.
One cat in a house is a sign of loneliness.
Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.
Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.
Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.
Man pines to live but cannot endure the days of his life.
I have no confidence in a man whose faults you cannot see.
Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.
Who has enough credit in this world to pay for his mistakes?
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.
A painter can hang his pictures, but a writer can only hang himself.
Perhaps Samuel Johnson was a great man; he was certainly a drumbling one.
We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism.
I know sage, wormwood, and hyssop, but I can't smell character unless it stinks.
I would rather take hellebore than spend a conversation with a good, little man.
A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night-fall.
When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
The earnings of a poet could be reckoned by a metaphysician rather than a bookkeeper.
The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.
No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.
We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.
Of all the animals on earth, none is so brutish as man when he seeks the delirium of coition.
We are a most solitary people, and we live, repelled by one another, in the gray, outcast cities of Cain.
We are uneasy with an affectionate man, for we are positive he wants something of us, particularly our love.
It is hideous and coarse to assume that we can do something for others-and it is vile not to endeavor to do it.
Everything ultimately fails, for we die, and that is either the penultimate failure or our most enigmatical achievement.
Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.
Utility is our national shibboleth: the savior of the American businessman is fact and his uterine half-brother, statistics.
Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.
Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.
We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.
The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.
Men are too unstable to be just; they are crabbed because they have not passed water at the usual time, or testy because they have not been stroked or praised.
There is a strange and mighty race of people called the Americans who are rapidly becoming the coldest in the world because of this cruel, man-eating idol, lucre.
Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.
Man is at the nadir of his stregth when the Earth, the seas, the mountains are not in him, for without them his soul is unsourced, and he has no images by which to abide.
We are always talking about being together, and yet whatever we invent destroys the family, and makes us wild, touchless beasts feeding on technicolor prairies and rivers.
Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.
Intellectual sodomy, which comes from the refusal to be simple about plain matters, is as gross and abundant today as sexual perversion and they are nowise different from one another.
Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.
It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.
One of the weaknesses in the cooperative is that it has never been sufficiently leavened by the imagination. This is a quick-silver faculty, and likely to be a cause of worry to any collective settlement.
Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.
The newspaper has debauched the American until he is a slavish, simpering, and angerless citizen; it has taught him to be a lump mass-man toward fraud, simony, murder, and lunacies more vile than those of Commodus or Caracalla.
What has a writer to be bombastic about? Whatever good a man may write is the consequence of accident, luck, or surprise, and nobody is more surprised than an honest writer when he makes a good phrase or says something truthful.