Quotes to inspire and reflect

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen .

To Herbert Westbrook, without whose never-failing advice, help, and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist .

Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt .

Your kneesare a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard?

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky.

Who shall say I am not

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary

I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage.

Make voyages!—Attempt them! —there’s nothing else.

Mrs. Stone found herself thinking that surely such beauty was a world of its own whose anarchy had a sort of godly license.

I don’t want realism. I want magic!

Turn that off! I won’t be looked at in this merciless glare!

STELL-LAHHHHH!

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the pleasures they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

You have Van Gogh’s ear for music.

[ Of Marilyn Monroe :] Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

Decidedly one of us will have to go.

To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. To be on the alert is to live, to be lulled into security is to die.

I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means.

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.

[ Reply when asked to name the hundredbest books of all time :] I fear that would be impossible, because I have only written five.

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Don’t tell me that you have exhausted life.

It is sad. One half of the world does not believe in God, and the other half does not believe in me.

I never put off till to-morrow what I can possibly do . . . the day after.

Prayer must never be answered: if it is, it ceases to be prayer, and becomes a correspondence.

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we area nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!

[ Of George Bernard Shaw :] An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

It is indeed a burning shame that thereshould be one law for men and another law for women. . . . I think that there should be no law for anybody.

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

Poets, you know, are always ahead of science; all the great discoveries of science have been stated before in poetry.

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

I know not whether Laws be right,

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

To recognize that the soul of a man is unknowable is the ultimate achievement of Wisdom. The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in a balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?

Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. . . . The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imaginationof my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.