A mind too proud to unbend over the small ridiculosa of life is as painful as a library with no trash in it.
Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be "Even though He slay me, yet will I make fun of Him!
The greatest poem ever known Is one all poets have outgrown: The poetry, innate, untold, Of being only four years old.
That's what this country needs -- more books!
My prayer is that what we have gone through [World War One] will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life, animal as well as human.
Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.
Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.
Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns, and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.
It will be a shock to men when they realize that thoughts that were fast enough for today are not fast enough for tomorrow. But thinking tomorrow's thoughts today is one kind of future life.
Man makes a great fuss about this planet which is only a ballbearing in the hub of the universe.
Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.
The human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake it is a victim of its own ill-adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions; it doubts its own sensations and trusts only in instruments and averages.
The world, in its sheer exuberance of kindness, will try to bury the poet with warm and lovely human trivialities. It will even ask him to autograph books.
I wish there could be an international peace conference of booksellers, for (you will smile at this) my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends in no small measure on them and on the librarians.
There are certain people whom one feels almost inclined to urge to hurry up and die so that their letters can be published.
Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men.
Words are a commodity in which there is never any slump.
Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.
All students can learn.
Never write up your diary on the day itself, for it takes longer than that to know what happened.
New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City. New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle; Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness.... There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory in Their skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.
People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.
Poetry comes with anger, hunger and dismay; it does not often visit groups of citizens sitting down to be literary together, and would appal them if it did.
How womanly it is to ask the unanswerable at the moment impossible.
Perhaps this is an age when men think bravely of the human spirit; for surely they have a strange lust to lay it bare.
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