“Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!”
“Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”
“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”
“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”
“If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.”
“To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. ... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.”
“The poet is the priest of the invisible.”
“The imagination is man's power over nature.”
“Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.”
“As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.”
“Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.”
“Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.”
“The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.”
“One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.”
“How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?”
“Civilization must be destroyed. The hairy saints of the North have earned this crumb by their complaints.”
“It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.”
“Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.”
“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.”
“Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.”
“They said, ''You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, ''Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.''”
“To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.”
“What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.”
“Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.”
“All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.”
“Union of the weakest develops strength not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge one of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow.”
“The genuine artist is never ''true to life.'' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.”
“Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.”
“I can't make head or tail of Life. Love is a fine thing, Art is a fine thing, Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure. Sometimes I think that all our learning is the little learning of the maxim. To laugh at a Roman awe-stricken in a sacred grove is to laugh at something today.”