“Why seek to embarrass [the artist] with vanities foreign to his quietness? Know you not that certain sciences require the whole man, leaving no part of him at leisure for your trifles?”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 142 of 303
“At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.”
“Using a first-person narrator is simply a matter of hearing the voice inside yourself.”
“I looked at Lucas with the pang that a parent feels when he knows his child will be hurt and that it's no one's fault and that to try to preempt the rites of passage is an act of contempt for the child's courage.”
“How do you caution a fawn about a cigarette a motorist has just flipped from his car window into a patch of yellow grass, or tell a sparrow that winged creatures eventually plummet to earth?”
“When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip.”
“In my walks, I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something out of the woods?”
“Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.”
“There is no just and serene criticism as yet.”
“Almost any mode of observation will be successful at last, for what is most wanted is method.”
“The startings and arrivals of the cars are now the epochs in the village day.”
“Of what significance are the things you can forget.”
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
“If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.”
“Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted or enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles.”
“In some pictures of Provincetown the persons of the inhabitants are not drawn below the ankles, so much being supposed to be buried in the sand.”
“I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.”
“I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.”
“We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.”
“In most books, the I, of first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference.”