Others

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.