- ...Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain.
- For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us.
- There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.
- The poor are wise, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casuality, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of love in it. With people of our own rank it is different.
- If I got nothing from the house of the rich I would get something at the house of the poor. Those who have much are often greedy; those who have little always share.
- I believe I am to have enough to live on for about eighteen months at any rate, so that if I may not write beautiful books, I may at least read beautiful books; and what joy can be greater?
- When you really want love you will find it waiting for you.
- But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
- The supreme vice is shallowness.
- The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.
- Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask.
- Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.
- For the artistic life is simply self-development.
- When he says, 'Forgive your enemies,' it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one's own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.
- Art has made us myriad-minded.
- Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that we should live.
- The final mystery is oneself.
- Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate.
- We are the zanies of sorrow. We are clowns whose hearts are broken. We are specially designed to appeal to the sense of humour.
- I have said that behind sorrow there is always sorrow. It were wiser still to say that behind sorrow there is always a soul. And to mock at a soul in pain is a dreadful thing.
- I have a strange longing for the great simple primeval things, such as the sea, to me no less of a mother than the Earth. It seems to me that we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
- We call ours a utilitarian age, and we do not know the uses of any single thing.
- Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
oct 11 2013 ∞
oct 12 2013 +
oct 12 2013 +