Others

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

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.

Man’s passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

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.

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.

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.