Great Throughts Treasury

"Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt."

"Sun and moon and day and night and man and beast each with a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside; each with an excellence!"

"Repression, however, is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look."

"Poetry... a place for the genuine, hands that can grasp, eyes that can dilate, hair that can rise."

"Superior people never make long visits"

"Sweden, what makes the people dress that way and those who see you wish to stay?"

"Tell my why the fen appears impassable,"

"Swirling crustacean- tailed equine amphibious creatures that garnish the axle-tree! What a fine thing! What un-annoying romance!"

"The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint."

"The criterion of suitability and convenience."

"The hands are the heart's messengers."

"The heart that gives, gathers."

"The East with its snails, its emotional shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, all of museum quality:"

"The monkeys winked too much and were afraid of snakes. The zebras, supreme in their abnormality; the elephants with their fog-colored skin and strictly practical appendages'.'"

"The Irish say your trouble is their trouble and your joy their joy? I wish I could believe it; I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish"

"The immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea."

"The ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bell buoys, advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink? in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness."

"The self does not realize itself most fully when self-realization is its most constant aim."

"The small tuft of fronds or katydid legs above each eye, still numbering the units in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth, to droop or rise."

"The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease."

"Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity."

"The raw material of poetry in all its rawness and that which is on the other hand genuine, you are interested in poetry."

"They fought the enemy, we fight fat living and self-pity. Shine, o shine, unfalsifying sun, on this sick scene."

"This ant-and stone-swallowing uninjurable artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done so."

"Un-ignorant, modest and unemotional, and all emotion, he has everlasting vigor, power to grow, though there are few creatures who can make one breathe faster and make one erecter."

"Truly as the sun can rot or mend, love can make one bestial or make a beast a man."

"There is a great amount of poetry in unconscious fastidiousness."

"Victory won't come to me unless I go to it; a grape tendril ties a knot in knots till knotted thirty times.'"

"We do not admire what we cannot understand."

"War is pillage versus resistance and if illusions of magnitude could be transmuted into ideals of magnanimity, peace might be realized."

"We are suffering from too much sarcasm."

"We do not like some things, and the hero doesn't; deviating head-stones and uncertainty; going where one does not wish to go; suffering and not saying so."

"What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe."

"What is there like fortitude! What sap went through that little thread to make the cherry red!"

"When dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry, 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."

"What is there in being able to say that one has dominated the stream in an attitude of self-defense; in proving that one has had the experience of carrying a stick?"

"When one cannot appraise out of one's own experience, the temptation to blunder is minimized, but even when one can, appraisal seems chiefly useful as appraisal of the appraiser."

"When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the same thing may be said for all of us, that we do not admire what we cannot understand."

"With its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral, with voices?one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept?the criterion of suitability and convenience."

"Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure."

"Wolf's wool is the best wool, but it cannot be sheared, because the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as with wolves' surliness, the student studies voluntarily, refusing to be less than individual. He gives his opinion and then rests upon it; he renders service when there is no reward, and is too reclusive for some things to seem to touch him; not because he has no feeling but because he has so much."

"You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability rather than an asset - that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp, conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything self-dependent, anything an ambitious civilization might produce: for you, unaided, to attempt through sheer reserve, to confuse presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. Would you not, minus thorns, be a what-is-this, a mere peculiarity? They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew; but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be re-membered too violently, your thorns are the best part of you."

"You are not male or female, but a plan deep-set within the heart of man."

"Your thorns are the best part of you."