If a man isn’t willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he’s no good

Two mystic states can be dissociated: the ecstatic-beneficent-and-benevolent, contemplation of the divine love, the divine splendour with goodwill toward others.And the bestial, namely the fanatical, the man on fire with God and anxious to stick...

Literature is news which stays news.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

I wonder why the wind, even the wind doth seemTo mock me now, all night, all night, andHave I strayed among the cliffs hereThey say, some day I’ll fallDown through the sea-bit fissures, and no...

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.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

And the good writer chooses his words for their ‘meaning’, but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots,...

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep herding.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, “Mamma, can I open the light?” She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a...

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the good writer...

The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

When you start searching for ‘pure elements’ in literature you will find that literature has been created by the following classes of persons: Inventors. Men who found a new process, or whose extant work gives...

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the...

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

No one knows, at sight a masterpiece.And give up verse, my boy,There’s nothing in it.Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me:Don’t kick against the pricks,Accept opinion. The Nineties tried your gameAnd died, there’s nothing...

Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.

Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

Usury is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

Rhythm must have meaning.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

The thought of what America would be likeIf the Classics had a wide circulationTroubles my sleep (Cantico del Sole)

It is difficult to write a paradiso when all the superficial indications are that you ought to write an apocalypse.

With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.

We claim no glory. If the tempest rollsAbout us we have fear, and thenHaving so small a stake grow bold again.We know not definitely even thisBut ’cause some vague half knowing half doth missOur consciousness...

The Garden En robe de parade. – SamainLike a skein of loose silk blown against a wallShe walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,And she is dying piece-mealof a sort of emotional...

Literature is news that stays news.

A real building is one on which the eye can light and stay lit.

And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.

Literature is language charged with meaning

In our time, the curse is monetary illiteracy, just as inability to read plain print was the curse of earlier centuries.

L’artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.