Others

Without music, life would be a mistake.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

In quiet places, reason abounds.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

Wit is educated insolence.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

The most beautiful words of love are told in silence for a look.

As you cannot do what you want, want what you can do.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make abody of more or less connected legend, rangingfrom the large and cosmogonic, to the level ofromantic fairy-story—the larger founded onthe lesser in contact with the earth, the lesserdrawing splendor from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate simply to: to England; tomy country.

 

Mastering the lawless science of our law,

 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

 

A great writer is, so to speak, a second government. That’s why no regime anywhere has ever loved its great writers, only its minor ones.

 

Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding.

 

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

 

The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them. . . . The traditional culture . . . is, of course, mainly literary . . . the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive.

 

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

 

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. The idea of being a writer attracts a good many shiftless people, those who are merely burdened with poetic feelings or afflicted with sensibility.

 

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night—brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

 

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

There are only two great diseases in the world today—Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.

 

Why were we crucified into sex?