My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven at one a.m.To love you till I die?Earth meets too many crimesFor fibs to interest her;If I can give...
Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither th...
Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.
What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?
Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serio...
The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
In the nightmare of the darkAll the dogs of Europe bark,And the living nations wait,Each sequestered in its hate;Intellectual disgraceStares from every human face,And the seas of pity lieLocked and fr...
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this...
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescen...
In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't thi...
When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being P...
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectivel...
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still onl...
No poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.
Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFro...
The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among it's desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with...
