Quotes to inspire and reflect

Terminate torment

Redeem

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?

The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.

The great poet, in writing himself, writes his time.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

Were we led all that way for

Between the idea

[The critic must] compose his differences with as many of his fellows as possible in the common pursuit of true judgement.

Dayadhvam : I have heard the key

I Tiresias have foresuffered all

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

“My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

Unreal City,

There is shadow under this red rock,

In the mountains, there you feel free.

You know only

Odors, confected by the cunning French,

Winter kept us warm, covering

Leaving the bubbling beverage to cool,

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. . . . It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. . . . It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible in art.

Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult . . . . The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

It [tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.

The broad-backed hippopotamus

He shall be washed as white as snow,

Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”

And even the Abstract Entities

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye

The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The winter evening settles down

I am moved by fancies that are curled

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

He laughed like an irresponsible fetus.

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

Do I dare

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land—if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?

Might, could, would—they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination.

There’s allays two ’pinions; there’s the ’pinion a man has of himself, and there’s the ’pinion other folks have on him. There’d be two ’pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.