Great Throughts Treasury

"The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable."

"The mystics themselves do not seem to have believed their physical and mental sufferings to be a sign of grace, but it is unfortunate that it is precisely physical manifestations which appeal most to the religiosity of the mob. A woman might spend twenty years nursing lepers without having any notice taken of her, but let her once exhibit the stigmata or live for long periods on nothing but the Host and water, and in no time the crowd will be clamoring for her beatification."

"The nightingales are sobbing in the orchards of our mothers, and hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others."

"The Ogre does what ogres can, deeds quite impossible for Man, but one prize is beyond his reach: the Ogre cannot master speech. About a subjugated plain, among it's desperate and slain, the Ogre stalks with hands on hips, while drivel gushes from his lips."

"The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles."

"The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears."

"The Oxford Don: `I don't feel quite happy about pleasure.'"

"The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born."

"The poet who writes "free" verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor."

"The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute."

"The sky is darkening like a stain something is going to fall like rain and it won't be flowers."

"The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten."

"The stars are dead; the animals will not look: we are left alone with our day, and the time is short and history to the defeated may say, ‘Alas but cannot help or pardon.’"

"The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good."

"The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it."

"The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts cried out in dismay at what the god had wrought to please her son, the strong iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles who would not live long."

"The Three Wiseman: the weather has been awful, the countryside is dreary,marsh, jungle, rock; and echoes mock, calling our hope unlawful; but a silly song can help along yours ever and sincerely: at least we know for certain that we are three old sinners, that this journey is much too long, that we want our dinners, and miss our wives, our books, our dogs, but have only the vaguest idea why we are what we are. To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star."

"The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

"The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is."

"The uncritical relations of the dead…"

"The virtue of patriotism has been extolled most loudly and publicly by nations that are in the process of conquering others, by the Roman, for example, in the first century B.C., the French in the 1790s, the English in the nineteenth century, and the Germans in the first half of the twentieth. To such people, love of one's country involves denying the right of others, of the Gauls, the Italians, the Indians, the Poles, to love theirs."

"The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in."

"The windiest militant trash important Persons shout is not so crude as our wish: what mad Nijinsky wrote about Diaghilev is true of the normal heart; for the error bred in the bone of each woman and each man craves what it cannot have; not universal love but to be loved alone."

"The word 'Intellectual' suggests straight away - A man who's untrue to his wife"

"The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living"

"Their fate must always be the same as yours, to suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes, holders of one position, wrong for years."

"There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children."

"There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired."

"There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again."

"There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; we must love one another or die."

"There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love."

"There will never be peace."

"There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye."

"There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ‘Did you get an erection?’ If the answer is Yes from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic."

"This great society is going smash; they cannot fool us with how fast they go, how much they cost each other and the gods! A culture is no better than its woods."

"Those who will not reason perish in the act: those who will not act perish for that reason."

"Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science."

"Though I believe it sinful to be queer, it has at least saved me from becoming a pillar of the establishment."

"Thoughts of his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic."

"Thousands have lived without love, not one without water."

"Time will say nothing but I told you so, time only knows the price we have to pay; iIf I could tell you I would let you know."

"To ask the hard question is simple, the simple act of the confused will."

"To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety."

"To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however "good" I may become, remains unchanged."

"To know all is to forgive all. No commonplace is more untrue. Behavior, whether conditioned by an individual neurosis or by society, can be understood, that is to say, one knows exactly why such and such an individual behaves as he does. But a personal action or deed is always mysterious. When we really act, precisely because it is a matter of free choice, we can never say exactly why we do this rather than that. But it is only deeds that we are required to forgive. If someone does me an injury, the question of forgiveness only arises if I am convinced (a) that the injury he did me was a free act on his part and therefore no less mysterious to him than to me, and (b) that it was me personally whom he meant to injure. He knows as well as they do why they are doing this -- they are a squad, detailed to execute a criminal. They do not know what they are doing, because it is not their business, as executioners, to know whom they are crucifying. If the person who does me an injury does not know what he is doing, then it is as ridiculous for me to talk about forgiving him as it would be for me to forgive a tile which falls on my head in a gale."

"To make one, there must be two."

"To me Art's subject is the human clay, and landscape but a background to a torso; all Cezanne's apples I would give away for one small Goya or a Daumier."

"To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention -- on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God -- that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying. The primary task of the schoolteacher is to teach children, in a secular context, the technique of prayer."

"To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally."

"To some degree every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."