Literature and Words

Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.

Twofold misjudgement. - The misfortune suffered by clear-minded and easily understood writers is that they are taken for shallow and thus little effort is expended on reading them: and the good fortune that attends the obscure is that the reader toils at them and ascribes to them the pleasure he has in fact gained from his own zeal.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

All I need is a sheet of paper and something to write with, and thenI can turn the world upside down.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.

Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.

Wit ought to be a glorious treat, like caviar. Never spread it about like marmalade.

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.

Nothing lays itself open to the charge of exaggeration more than the language of naked truth.

Yes, there is a nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if possible, speak a few reasonable words.

Where words fail, music speaks.

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.

Art extends each man’s short time on earth by carrying from man to man the whole complexity of other men’s lifelong experience, with all its burdens, colors and flavor.

When you take stuff from one writer, it’s plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers it’s research.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

For a man to become a poet he must be in love, or miserable.