Quotes to inspire and reflect

We only live, only suspire

Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

In the uncertain hour before the morning

Music heard so deeply

Who are only undefeated

We must be still and still moving

Not fare well,

Old men ought to be explorers.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

And so each venture

The whole earth is our hospital

In spite of that, we call this Friday good.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:

When you notice a cat in profound meditation,

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

Even among these rocks,

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

Wavering between the profit and the loss

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.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

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

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

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

I Tiresias have foresuffered all

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

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

There is shadow under this red rock,

Unreal City,

You know only

In the mountains, there you feel free.

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.

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

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

The broad-backed hippopotamus