Quotes

All but the hard-hearted must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.

I think I will not hang myself today.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

This diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.

The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapors, these are the daily weather of this world.

Fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairytale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. . . . When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.

Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit: but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent’s faith is to say I must not discuss it.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words—” free-love”—as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all the exhilaration of a vice.

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are.

I’m a seagull. No, that’s wrong. Remember you shot a seagull? A man happened to come along, saw it and killed it, just to pass the time.

When a woman isn’t beautiful, people always say, “You have lovely eyes, you have lovely hair.”

I’m in mourning for my life, I’m unhappy.

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it’s disorderly, it’s not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything through my infidelity.

Yblessed be god that I have wedded fyve!

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

And therefore, at the kynges court, my brother,

The original writer is not he who refrains from imitating others, but he who can be imitated by none.

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,

Letter to Edward Weeks, 18 Jan. 1947

Would you convey your compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

Law is where you buy it in this town.

You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

[ Credo of fictional detective Philip Marlowe :] Trouble Is My Business.

I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them on the long winter evenings.

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? . . . You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that.

The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot [depicted in a painting] might be pregnant with revolution!

[ Remark to Ambroise Vollard :] Monet is only an eye, but my God what an eye!

My mouth shall be the mouth of misfortunes which have no mouth, my voice the freedoms of those freedoms which break down in the prison-cell of despair.

I see several Africas and one vertical in the tumultuous event with its screens and nodules, a little separated, but within the century, like a heart in reserve.

[ Don Quixote’s epitaph :] To die in wisdom, having lived in folly.

[ Of impending death :] One foot already in the stirrup.

Digo, paciencia y barajar .

Dos linajes solos hay en el mundo . . . que son el tener y el no tener .

He’s a muddle-headed fool, with frequent lucid intervals.

We cannot all be friars, and many are the ways by which God leads his own to eternal life.

El Caballero de la Triste Figura .

To tilt against windmills.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I won’t try to recall, there lived, not long ago, one of those gentlemen, who usually keep a lance upon a rack, an old shield, a lean horse, and a greyhound for coursing.