The trick is to realize that after giving your best, there's nothing more to give.
Fine writers should split hairs together, and sit side by side, like friendly apes, to pick the fleas from each others fur.
Logan Pearsall Smith
I am convinced digestion is the great secret of life.
Sydney Smith
Oh, don't tell me of facts -- I never believe facts: you know Canning said nothing was so fallacious as facts, except figures.
It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.
Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love and to be loved is the greatest happiness of existence.
It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death-warrant; but it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in the joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects.
Avoid shame but do not seek glory --nothing so expensive as glory.
Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
A comfortable house is a great source of happiness. It ranks immediately after health and a good conscience.
As a bathtub lined with white porcelain, when the hot water gives out or goes tepid, so is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, o my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.
Ezra Pound
We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money (needs money to buy tools, time, food), the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
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.
The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
'Tis not need we know our every thought or see the work shop where each mask is wrought wherefrom we view the world of box and pit, careless of wear, just so the mask shall fit and serve our jape's turn for a night or two.
No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention and clich?, not from real life.
A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
With one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands.
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
I have never known anyone worth a damn who wasn't irascible.
Wars are made to make debt.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
Mass ought to be in Latin, unless you could do it in Greek or Chinese. In fact, any abracadabra that no bloody member of the public or half-educated ape of a clargimint could think he understood.
All great art is born of the metropolis.
A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
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.
The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort.
Colin Powell
Experts often possess more data than judgment.
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier.
Either move or be moved.
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