WednesdayAug 26, 2026
Quotes: 53419 Authors: 9969
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
Now is the age of anxiety.
Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
This is the Night Mail crossing the Border Bringing the cheque and the postal order.
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
Evil is unspectacular and always human And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
The Old Masters. About suffering they were never wrong.
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
We are here on Earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I do not know.
What all schoolchildren learn: those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
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.
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.
How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a 'suspension of belief.' A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
... see without looking, ... hear without seeing, ... breathe without asking.
Who on earth invented the silly convention that it is boring or impolite to talk shop? Nothing is more interesting to listen to, especially if the shop is not one's own.
It takes little talent to see what is under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in what direction to point that organ.
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
To save your world you asked this man to die; Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
My face looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work 'comes' to him.
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at.
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
Geniuses are the luckiest mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.
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