Great Throughts Treasury

"What are we, the beast that walks upright, with speaking lips and little hair, to think we should always be fed, sheltered, intact, and self-controlled?"

"When I first went to Occidental College... there was a literary magazine...called the Aurora, and I remember thinking it odd that Occidental ? the west, the setting sun ? should be represented by a magazine called Aurora, the dawn. At least it gave us a wide range, the whole daylight sky."

"When the sun shouts and people abound one thinks there were the ages of stone and the age of bronze and the Iron Age; iron the unstable metal; steel made of iron, unstable as his mother; the towered-up cities will be stains of rust on mounds of plaster. Roots will not pierce the heaps for a time, kind rains will cure them, then nothing will remain of the iron age and all these people but a thigh-bone or so, a poem stuck in the world's thought, splinters of glass in the rubbish dumps, a concrete dam far off in the mountain..."

"Where the surf has come incredible ways out of the splendid west, over the deeps light nor life sounds forever; here where enormous sundowns flower and burn through color to quietness."

"Which failure cannot cast down nor success make proud."

"We that have the honor and hardship of being human are one flesh with the beasts, and the beasts with the plants. It is all truly one life, red blood and tree-sap, animal, mineral, sidereal, one stream, one organism, one God."

"While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I and protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth. Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother. You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly a mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic. But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains. And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master. There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--they say-- God, when he walked on earth."

"Why, even in humanity beauty and good show, from the mountainside of solitude."

"You are so beautiful. Even this side the stars and below the moon. How can you be...all this...and me also? ...Yet two or three times in my life my walls have fallen--beyond love--no room for love-- I have been you."

"You ask what I am for and what I am against in Spain. I would give my right hand of course to prevent the agony; I would not give a flick of my little finger to help either side win."

"You have perhaps heard some false reports on the subject of God. He is not dead; and he is not a fable. He is not mocked nor forgotten--Successfully. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars--If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears--and where is the German Reich? There also will be prodigious America and world-owning China. I say that all hopes and empires will die like yours; mankind will die, there will be no more fools; wisdom will die; the very stars will die; one fierce life lasts."