85 quotes found
“Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot but make it hot by striking.”
“This melancholy London. I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.”
“I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all — the colleges I mean — like an opera.”
“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal, — that is they have ceased to be self-centered, have given up th...”
“Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses. Poets are the policem...”
“The years like great black oxen tread the world,And God the herdsman goads them on behind,And I am broken by their passing feet.”
“We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life becau...”
“The friends that have it I do wrongWhenever I remake a songShould know what issue is at stake,It is myself that I remake.”
“Do what you will. I do not understand stops. I write my work so completely for the ear that I feel helpless when I have to measure pauses by stops & commas.”
“One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: Hammer your thoughts into unity. For d...”
“I agree about Shaw — he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.”
“This country will not always be an uncomfortable place for a country gentleman to live in, and it is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am afraid that La...”
“The official designs of the Government, especially its designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage, may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors of national taste.”
“Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.”
“The Babylonian starlight broughtA fabulous, formless darkness in;Odour of blood when Christ was slainMade all platonic tolerance vainAnd vain all Doric discipline.”
“Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;But I, being young and foolish,...”
“Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berries And of reddest ...”
“The woods of Arcady are dead,And over is their antique joy;Of old the world on dreaming fed;Grey Truth is now her painted toy;Yet still she turns her restless head.”
“Words alone are certain good.”
“Dream, dream, for this is also sooth.”
