Quotes to inspire and reflect

The truth is that every morning war is declared afresh. And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in his work for the latter to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.

The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur. . . . This life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book! How happy would be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him!

À la Recherche du Temps Perdu .

For a long time I used to go to bed early.

Les Demi-Vierges .

Je suis comme je suis

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

But the beauty is not the madness

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

Paquin pull down!

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Usura slayeth the child in the wombIt stayeth the young man’s courtingIt hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM

Lie quiet Divus.

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.”

Better mendacities

Unaffected by “the march of events,”

We have one sap and one root—

His true Penelope was Flaubert,

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (“as addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl

Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside,

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come:

Vast chain of Being, which from God began,

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.

While the stars that oversprinkle

In her sepulchre there by the sea,

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home,

It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution—I mean for the outré character of its features.

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

Where the lion’s skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox’s.

[ Socrates speaking :] Let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all. . . . When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what “knowing” means.

God ever geometrizes.

[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?

[ Socrates speaking :] Democracy . . . would, it seems, be a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

[ Socrates speaking :] Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun.

[ Thrasymachus speaking :] I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.