Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
I can only do what's easy. I can only entice and be enticed. I can't, and won't, attempt difficult relations. If I marry it will either be a man who's strong enough to boss me or whom I'm strong enough to boss. So I shan't ever marry, for there aren't such men. And Heaven help any one whom I do marry, for I shall certainly run away from him before you can say 'Jack Robinson.
Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.
Books have to be read (worse luck it takes so long a time). It is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the West.
At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.
It isn't possible to love and to part.
You told me once that we shall be judged by our intentions, not by our accomplishments. I thought it a grand remark. But we must intend to accomplish - not sit intending on a chair.
Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque. A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.
There are moments when the inner life actually 'pays,' when years of self-scrutiny, conducted for no ulterior motive, are suddenly of practical use.
Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown
She loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an hour.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible. I dislike the stuff. I do not believe in it, for its own sake, at all... My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul. My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is 'Lord, I disbelieve - help thou my unbelief.
There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.
Adventures do occur, but not punctually.
They go forth [into the world] with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds and undeveloped hearts. An undeveloped heart - not a cold one. The difference is important.
The sun was already declining and each of the trees held a premonition of night.
. . . life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t'other from which . . .
But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.
He doesn't want you to be real, and to think and to live. He doesn't love you. But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.
So, two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
People have their own deaths as well as their own lives, and even if there is nothing beyond death, we shall differ in our nothingness.
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