“When you put your hand on the Bible, you are saying something much stronger than just telling your peers that you're going to tell the truth.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 181 of 303
“When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.”
“Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.”
“When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.”
“I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few became qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced, and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer until finally they got reduced to one - to who I am. And that's who I am.”
“Unmixed praise is not due to any one. It leaves behind a sense of unreality. We can only do justice to a great man by a discriminating criticism. Hero-worship, which paints a faultless monster, whom the world never saw, is like those modern pictures which are a blaze of light without any shadow.”
“Be straight with yourself just to maybe save a few more people from being stupid and being ignorant.”
“I don't consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.”
“I learned to walk when I was ten months old and I've been walking this way ever since.”
“We must ask ourselves how many times others would benefit more from our silence than from our words.”
“Control your generosity when dealing with a chronic borrower.”
“Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.”
“A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.”
“One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.”
“Most writers write books that they wouldn't read. I ought to know; I've done it myself.”
“Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand that it is immodest and greedy to want more.”
“I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good. I need daylight to begin. Between nine and ten o'clock I have a long breakfast with reading and music.”
“There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more”
“It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.”
“I believe that we should read only those books that bite and sting us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it?”