Literature and Words

Dort, wo man Bücher

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million … but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher.

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.

The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

BOSWELL : Sir, what is poetry?

Souls of poets dead and gone,

So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

Books think for me.

Reader, look

[A pun] is a pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect.

Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging … Shakespeare wanted art.

If, with the literate, I am

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

Shaw is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest figures. I once said of him that his plays remind me of Mozart. There is not one superfluous word in Shaw’s prose, just as there is not one superfluous note in Mozart’s" music.

I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing.

A man’s library is a sort of harem.

The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.