Great Throughts Treasury

"I love the clouds... the clouds that pass by... over there... over there... those lovely clouds!"

"I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on, The windows and the stars illumined, one by one, The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily, And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass; And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass, I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight, And build me stately palaces by candlelight."

"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws."

"I say that the unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty that do evil."

"I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge."

"I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination."

"I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy . . . But that type of criticism is destined for books of poetry and for readers of poetry. As to criticism proper, I hope philosophers will understand what I am about to say: to be in focus, in other words to justify itself, criticism must be partial, passionate, political, that is to say it must adopt an exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizons."

"I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; my heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know."

"I think I already wrote in my notes about that love is like striking a torture or a surgical operation. But this idea can be developed in the most excruciating. Even if the two lovers would be deeply in love and longing for each other, one of them will always be calmer or less than the other possessed. He - or she - is the operator, or executioner; other subject, the victim. Hear these groans, prelude to a tragedy of dishonor, moans, cries, horcaiturile? Who has not uttered, whom it extorted not without possible to oppose? And you find worse ordeal professed by some meticulous torturers? Eyes they sleepwalker gleamed limbs whose muscles jerk with power and flex, as if they incur a galvanic cell, drunkenness, delirium, opium, in their consequences most violent, it will provide with certainly examples so curious where you have that one player to lose self-control!"

"I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul."

"I think I would still be good where I am not, and this relocation issue is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul."

"I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?"

"I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, ? Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet."

"I was just sad, inconceivably sad. Like the priest who ripped his divinity, could not, without heartbreaking bitterness, let go of that sea so monstrously seductive, that sea so infinitely varied in its terrifying simplicity that seems to contain itself, and represent in their games, his bearing, in his anger and smiles, humors, agonies and ecstasies of all souls who have lived, live and will live. Leave of incomparable beauty, I feel I am shot to death."

"I watch the springs, the summers, the autumns; and when comes the winter snow monotonous, I shut all the doors and shutters to build in the night my fairy palace."

"I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things."

"I would compare to a black sun if one could conceive of a black star can shed light and happiness. But suggests more comfortable in the moon, which undoubtedly pointed his formidable influence; not the white moon of idylls, like a cold girlfriend, but the sinister and intoxicating moon, hanging from the bottom of a stormy night and hit by clouds running; not gentle and unobtrusive, sleep of pure men, moon but the moon torn from the sky, defeated and rebellious, whom the witches force hard to dance on the terrified grass."

"If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it."

"If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature."

"If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally."

"If rape or arson, poison or the knife has woven no pleasing patterns in the stuff of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!"

"If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force."

"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."

"If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites."

"If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible."

"I'm not saying that the world will be reduced to expedient means and ridiculous disorder of the South American republics, - that we could maybe even return to savagery, and walk through the overgrown ruins of our civilization searching for food with a gun in our hand. No; - because such a destiny and such adventures would still presuppose a vital energy, an echo of primeval ages. As the new example and the new victims of inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by what we thought was our life-giver. Engineering will make us so Americanized, progress will create such great atrophy of everything spiritual in us, that the bloody, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the utopians could never compare with its positive results."

"Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies."

"Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. Without her, all the faculties, sound and acute though they may be, seem nonexistent; whereas the weakness of some secondary faculties is a minor misfortune if stimulated by a vigorous imagination. None of them could do without her, and she is able to compensate for some of the others. Often what they look for, finding it only after a series of attempts by several methods not adapted to the nature of things, she intuits, proudly and simply. Lastly, she plays a role even in morality; for, allow me to go so far as to say, what is virtue without imagination?"

"Immediate work, even poor, is worth more than dreams."

"In a busy: The deafening street around me was screaming.? Tall, slender, in deep mourning, majestic grief, A woman passed, with a lavish hand-raising, swinging the festoon and hem, agile and noble with his leg statue. I drank, tense as extravagant, in his eye, livid sky where germ Hurricane, the softness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills. A lightning? then night! - Fugitive beauty whose glance I was suddenly reborn, do I'll see you in eternity? Elsewhere, far from here! Too late! Perhaps forever! For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go, O thou that I have loved, O you who knew it!"

"In art, there is one thing which does not receive sufficient attention. The element which is left to the human will is not nearly so large as people think."

"In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol."

"In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us."

"In love, as in almost all cases between people's hearts harmony arises from a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is a pleasure."

"In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful."

"In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men."

"In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!"

"In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times."

"In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle."

"In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it."

"In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude; Daguerre was his messiah."

"In the flood of her joy, the Moon filled the room like a phosphoric atmosphere, like a luminous poison."

"In this black hole lives or bright life, dream life, life suffers."

"In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love."

"In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care."

"In times of old when Nature in her glad excess brought forth such living marvels as no more are seen, I should have loved to dwell with a young giantess, like a voluptuous cat about the feet of a queen."

"Indeed, dear, do you trouble me without rate and compassion; it would seem, to hear you sigh, undergoing more than gleaners and beggars that are collecting old crusts of bread at the doors of the taverns. If your sighs expressed remorse even, some would honor you; but do not translate but satiety welfare and burden the break. And besides, you do not cease to speak useless words: Love me! I need it both! Console me here, touch me by there! Look: I will try to cure you; perhaps two incomes find the way, in the middle of a party and not go very far. Contemplate well, I beg you , this solid iron cage behind which is agitated, howling like a condemned man , shaking the bars like an orangutan exasperated by exile, imitating to perfection and circular tiger, and stupid sways white bear, hirsute monster whose shape mimics vaguely yours. That monster is an animal from those they are often called angel mine! A woman. The one monster, screaming loudly, with a stick in hand, is her husband. He has chained his legitimate wife like an animal, and he is teaching by the slums, the fair days, licensed judges; missing no more. Look you well! See how not simulated - truth - destroys live rabbits and volatile garish, his mahout throws him. Go esters says, do not eat it all in one day; and following the wise words cruelly snatches the prey, leaving a moment lit the skein of waste to the teeth of the ferocious beast, mean woman."

"Indeed, for my part, I shall be happy to leave A world where action is not sister to the dream."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?"