Quote collection
487 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through."
"Love the questions themselves...Live the questions now and have confidence that someday far into the future, [I will live my] way into the answer."
"True singing is a different breath, about nothing."
"Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness."
"So it's back once more, back up the slope. Why do they always ruin my rope with their cuts? I felt so ready the other day, Had a real foretaste of eternity In my guts. Spoonfeeding me yet another sip from life's cup. I don't want it, won't take any more of it. Let me throw up. Life is medium rare and good, I see, And the world full of soup and bread, But it won't pass into the blood for me, Just goes to my head. It makes me ill, though others it feeds; Do see that I must deny it! For a thousand years from now at least I'm keeping a diet."
"Describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty-describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory."
"Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature."
"To work is to live without dying."
"The thought of being a creator, of engendering, of shaping is nothing without the continuous great confirmation and embodiment in the world, nothing without the thousandfold assent from Things and animals... beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the engendering and birthing of millions."
"sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot."
"Earth, is not this what you will: in us to rise up invisible? Is it, O Earth, not your dream once to be wholly invisible? Earth! Invisible! What, if not change, is your desperate mission?"
"But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls."
"As if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose."
"I would like to step out of my heart and go walking beneath the enormous sky."
"It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)"
"There are quite a number of people in the reading-room; but one is not aware of them. They are inside the books. They move, sometimes, within the pages like sleepers turning over between two dreams. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading."
"She who reconciles the ill-matched threads Of her life, and weaves them gratefully Into a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall And clears it for a different celebration."
"There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along."
"The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable it is alternately stone in you and star."
"To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count."