Great Throughts Treasury

"There was never a war that wasn’t inward."

"Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage."

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence."

"You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief."

"Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time."

"Men are monopolists of "stars, garters, buttons and other shining baubles" - unfit to be the guardians of another person's happiness."

"Another armored animal?scale lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they form the uninterrupted central tail-row!"

"Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others."

"A place as kind as it is green, the greenest place I've never seen. Every name is a tune."

"Anybody can write a book, 'cause everybody has a story to tell."

"As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one's attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists."

"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself."

"As contagion of sickness makes sickness, contagion of trust can make trust"

"At all events there is in Brooklyn something that makes me feel at home."

"Concurring hands divide flax for damask that when bleached by Irish weather has the silvered chamois-leather water-tightness of a skin."

"Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous?"

"Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one...of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist. The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it?s not established once and for all; it?s evolving."

"Camels are snobbish and sheep, unintelligent; water buffaloes, neurasthenic? even murderous. Reindeer seem over-serious."

"Discovering Antarctica, its penguin kings and icy spires..."

"Bedizened or stark naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing- master to this world, griffons a dark Like does not like like that is obnoxious.'"

"Durer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at."

"Here we have thirst and patience, from the first, and art, as in a wave held up for us to see in its essential perpendicularity; Not brittle but intense--the spectrum, that spectacular and humble animal the fish, whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish."

"Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity."

"Hate-hardened heart, O heart of iron, iron is iron till it is rust. There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war, but I would not believe it."

"He's not out seeing a sight but the rock crystal thing to see?the startling El Greco brimming with inner light?that covets nothing that it has let go. This then you may know as the hero."

"Hindered characters seldom have mothers in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers."

"I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it."

"I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine."

"If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist."

"I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it"

"I have seen this swan and I have seen you; I have seen ambition without understanding in a variety of forms."

"If we can't be cordial to these creatures' fleece, I think that we deserve to freeze."

"If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try."

"If compression is the first grace of style, you have it."

"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

"In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity."

"Imaginary gardens with real toads in them... if you demand on one hand, the raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, then you are interested in poetry."

"in the absence of feet, a method of conclusions; a knowledge of principles, in the curious phenomenon of your occipital horn."

"Is an enchanted thing like the glaze on a katydid-wing?"

"It is a power of strong enchantment. It is like the dove- neck animated by sun; it is memory's eye; it's conscientious inconsistency."

"It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing."

"It is quite cruel that a poet cannot wander through his regions of enchantment without having a critic, forever, like the old man of the sea, upon his back."

"My father used to say, Superior people never make long visits, have to be shown Longfellow's grave or the glass flowers at Harvard."

"Nevertheless you've seen a strawberry that's had a struggle; yet was, where the fragments met, a hedgehog or a star-fish for the multitude of seeds. What better food than apple seeds - the fruit within the fruit - locked in like counter-curved twin hazelnuts? Frost that kills the little rubber-plant -leaves of kok-sagyyz-stalks, can't harm the roots; they still grow in frozen ground. Once where there was a prickly-pear -leaf clinging to a barbed wire, a root shot down to grow in earth two feet below; as carrots from mandrakes or a ram's-horn root some-times. Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendrilties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times ? so the bound twig that's under-gone and over-gone, can't stir. The weak overcomes its menace, the strong over-comes itself. What is there like fortitude! What sap went through that little thread to make the cherry red!"

"Nor till the poets among us can be literalists of the imagination above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have it."

"O to be a dragon a symbol of the power of Heaven?of silkworm size or immense; at times invisible. Felicitous phenomenon!"

"Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps adjusting the ash heaps; opening and shutting itself like an injured fan."

"Poetry is all nouns and verbs."

"Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads."

"Poetry, that is to say the poetic, is a primal necessity."