Quotes

To have gathered from the air a live tradition or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame

America, my country, is almost a continent and hardly yet a nation.

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,

Paquin pull down!

Learn of the green world what can be thy place

What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross

Usura slayeth the child in the wombIt stayeth the young man’s courtingIt hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Lie quiet Divus.

Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but the one “Sordello.”

Unaffected by “the march of events,”

Better mendacities

His true Penelope was Flaubert,

We have one sap and one root—

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Poetry is about as much a “criticism of life” as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Objectivity and again objectivity, and expression: no hindside-before-ness, no straddled adjectives (“as addled mosses dank”), no Tennysonianness of speech; nothing—nothing that you couldn’t, in some circumstance, in the stress of some emotion, actually say.

Chaste to her husband, frank to all beside,

There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow;

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined,

Vast chain of Being, which from God began,

You beat your pate, and fancy wit will come:

There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment.

While the stars that oversprinkle

In her sepulchre there by the sea,

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them.

I admit the deed!—tear up the planks! here, here!—It is the beating of his hideous heart!

It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution—I mean for the outré character of its features.

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home,

Where the lion’s skin will not reach, you must patch it out with the fox’s.

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, and unapproachable bogs.

God ever geometrizes.

[ Socrates speaking :] Let us suppose that every mind contains a kind of aviary stocked with birds of every sort, some in flocks apart from the rest, some in small groups, and some solitary, flying in any direction among them all. . . . When we are babies we must suppose this receptacle empty, and take the birds to stand for pieces of knowledge. Whenever a person acquires any piece of knowledge and shuts it up in his enclosure, we must say he has learned or discovered the thing of which this is the knowledge, and that is what “knowing” means.

[ Socrates speaking :] Democracy . . . would, it seems, be a delightful form of government, anarchic and motley, assigning a kind of equality indiscriminately to equals and unequals alike!

[ Socrates speaking :] Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. . . . Like to us. . . . Tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?

[ Thrasymachus speaking :] I affirm that the just is nothing else than the advantage of the stronger.

[ Socrates speaking :] Unless either philosophers become kings in our states or those whom we now call our kings and rulers take to the pursuit of philosophy seriously and adequately, and there is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence, while the motley horde of the natures who at present pursue either apart from the other are compulsorily excluded, there can be no cessation of troubles, dear Glaucon, for our states, nor, I fancy, for the human race either. Nor, until this happens, will this constitution which we have been expounding in theory ever be put into practice within the limits of possibility and see the light of the sun.

[ Socrates speaking :] If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

[ Of Socrates :] Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.

[ Socrates speaking :] Life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

[ Socrates speaking :] Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?

[ Socrates speaking, describing the charge against him :] Socrates is guilty of corrupting the minds of the young, and of believing in deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.

Dying

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.