Quote collection
274 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind."
"The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real."
"Freedom is like a man who kills himself Each night, an incessant butcher, whose knife Grows sharp in blood."
"Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics."
"Beauty is momentary in the mind -- The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing."
"Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches."
"Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs."
"Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress."
"Most people read poetry listening for echoes because the echoes are familiar to them. They wade through it the way a boy wades through water, feeling with his toes for the bottom: The echoes are the bottom."
"Children picking up our bones Will never know that these were once As quick as foxes on the hill."
"If poetry should address itself to the same needs and aspirations, the same hopes and fears, to which the Bible addresses itself, it might rival it in distribution."
"It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom."
"Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!"
"We say God and the imagination are one... How high that highest candle lights the dark."
"Realism is a corruption of reality."
"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."
"The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence."
"I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange."
"in the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination."
"The imagination is the liberty of the mind It is intrpeid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction."