Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I found after seventy years that I was not a lunatic but a moron.... I should have been able to do better.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
The intellect is a very nice whirligig toy, but how people take it seriously is more than I can understand.
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good.
Religion I have defined as "Another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art".
Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.
install me in any profession Save this damn'd profession of writing, where one needs one's brains all the time.
The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully cultivated by the inferiority complex of the public.
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
I dunno what my 23 infantile years in America signify. I left as soon as motion was autarchic -- I mean my motion.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.
USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
The thought of what America would be like If the Classics had a wide circulation Troubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)
A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.
The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.
The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.
In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.
From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.
Poetry is a very complex art.... It is an art of pure sound bound in through an art of arbitrary and conventional symbols.
Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance... poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
And the days are not full enough And the nights are not full enough And life slips by like a field mouse Not shaking the grass
The man who fears war and squats opposing My words for stour, hath no blood of crimson But is fit only to rot in womanish peace
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning.
And in the mean time my songs will travel, And the devirginated young ladies will enjoy them when they have got over the strangeness
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
The only thing one can give an artist is leisure in which to work. To give an artist leisure is actually to take part in his creation.
A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.
Fit for kings, formal gardens afford an earthly Elysium and the odd impression that we mere men might actually control nature for a time.
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!
As for literature It gives no man a sinecure. And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There's nothing in it.
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
Yet the companions of the Muses will keep their collective nose in my books And weary with historical data, they will turn to my dance tune.
The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.
A crowd pagan as ever imperial Rome was, eager, careless, with an animal vigour unlike that of any European crowd that I have ever looked at.
What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Discoveries are made by gluttons and addicts. The man who forgets to eat and sleep has an appetite for fact, for interrelations among causes.
It doesn't matter which leg of your table you make first, so long as the table has four legs and will stand up solidly when you have finished it.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom
There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance. I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five per cent.
To say that a state cannot pursue its aims because there is no money, is like saying that an engineer cannot build roads, because there are no kilometers.
The serious artist must be as open as nature. Nature does not give all of herself in a paragraph. She is rugged and not set apart into discreet categories.
The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.