The women take so little stock In what I do or say They'd sooner leave their cosseting To hear a jackass bray.
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me.
Fair and foul are near of kin And fair needs foul," I cried. "My friends are gone, but that's a truth Nor grave nor bed denied."
Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.
Everything that man esteems Endures a moment or a day. Love's pleasure drives his love away, The painter's brush consumes his dreams.
I whispered, 'I am too young,' and then, 'I am old enough'; wherefore I threw a penny to find out if I might love.
A poet is a good citizen turned inside out.
A lonely impulse of delight
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936
Tis the eternal law, That first in beauty should be first in might.
In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
Poetry and music I have banished, But the stupidity Of root, shoot, blossom or clay Makes no demand. I bend my body to the spade Or grope with a dirty hand.
Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.
What's memory but the ash That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?
Things thought too long can be no longer thought, For beauty dies of beauty, worth of worth, And ancient lineaments are blotted out.
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss I hear white Beauty sighing, too, For hours when all must fade like dew.
All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake.
It is not permitted to a man, who takes up pen or chisel, to seek originality, for passion is his only business, and he cannot but mould or sing after a new fashion because no disaster is like another.
For how can you compete Being honour bred, with one Who, were it proved he lies, Were neither shamed in his own Nor in his neighbour's eyes?
Florence Farr once said to me, If we could say to ourselves, with sincerity, 'this passing moment is as good as any I shall ever know,' we could die upon the instant and be united with God.
I can forgive even that wrong of wrongs, Those undreamt accidents that have made me Seeing that Fame has perished this long while, Being but a part of ancient ceremony Notorious, till all my priceless things Are but a post the passing dogs defile.
What can I but enumerate old themes?
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