Great Throughts Treasury

"Come to the edge, He said. They said: we are afraid. Come to the edge, He said. They came. He pushed them, and they flew."

"One can't carry one's father's corpse about everywhere. "

"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. "

"A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural, when its elements no longer have their justification in nature."

"And for your eyes my life takes poison slowly."

"And love runs down like this water, love runs down. How slow life is, how violent hope is."

"And now comes the summer of violence and my youth is as dead as the springtime O Sun it is the time of fiery Reason."

"And the single string of the marine trumpets."

"Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman."

"Farewell, false love, I took you for the woman that I lost last year Forever as I think: I loved her but I will not see Her any more in Germany. O Milky Way, sister in whiteness To Canaan's rivers and the bright Bodies of lovers drowned; can we follow toilsomely Your path to other nebulae?"

"From this new alliance – for until now costume and scenery on one hand, choreography on the other, have been linked only artificially – there has resulted in Parade a kind of sur-réalisme."

"I hate artists who are not of their time."

"I sing the joy of wandering and the pleasure of the wanderer's death"

"I picked this sprig of heather. Autumn has died you must remember. We shall not see each other ever. I'm waiting and you must remember. Time's perfume is a sprig of heather."

"It's raining my soul, it's raining, but it's raining dead eyes."

"I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts."

"Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer."

"I used to walk by the river an old book under my arm the river is the same as pain it elapses mindlessly and when will the week be over."

"Joy always came after pain."

"I've made a song for the poorly loved And songs for everything I grieved For unaccompanied slave and shark, For queens who've gone into the dark."

"Memories are hunting horns whose sound dies on the wind."

"Nor days nor any time detain. Time past or any love cannot come again."

"One day One day I waited for myself I said to myself Guillaume it's time you came So I could know just who I am I who know others"

"The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection."

"O pretty ship, my memory isn't this far enough to sea, and the sea not fit to drink? Haven't we drifted far and lost from fair dawn to dreary dusk?"

"To insist is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality."

"O mouths humanity seeks a new language beyond the reach of grammarians."

"The poems I am writing at the moment will be much closer to your present way of thinking. I am trying to renew poetic style, but within a classical framework. On the other hand, I don't want to lapse into imitating others."

"Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine. Why must I be reminded again Of our love? Doesn't happiness issue from pain? Bring on the night, ring out the hour. The days wear on but I endure."

"We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go."

"To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality."

"We hurry since everything hurries And I shall never not return Memories are all archaic horns Silenced by the wind."

"We mean to explore kindness and its enormous silences."

"Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere."

"When man wanted to make a machine that would walk he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg."

"You see before you a man in his right mind Worldly-wise and with access to death Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies Having sometimes even astonished the professors Good with languages Having travelled a great deal Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform Having lost my best friends in the butchery As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know."