 A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations. |
| The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people. |
| Wars are made to make debt. |
| The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity. |
| People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf. |
| Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art. |
| Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. |
| Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents. |
| Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. |
| Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. |
| Genius... is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one. |
| Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. |
| The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. |
| A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values. |
| If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practiced, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point. |
| No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. |
| I could I trust starve like a gentleman. It's listed as part of the poetic training, you know. |
| I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later. |
| In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries. |
| Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value. |
