59 quotes
English writer and poet (1885–1930)
“The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.”
"Nobody knows you.You don't know yourself.And I, who am half in love with you,What am I in love with?My own imaginings?"
on Love
"The only justice is to follow the sincere intuition of the soul, angry or gentle. Anger is just, and pity is just, but judgement is never just."
on Ethics
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted."
on Society
"The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being."
on Life
"The profoundest of all sensualitiesis the sense of truthand the next deepest sensual experienceis the sense of justice."
on Truth
"There is nothing to save, now all is lost,but a tiny core of stillness in the heartlike the eye of a violet."
"For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack."
"Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains, always was."
on Freedom
"Never trust the teller. Trust the tale."
"The great virtue in life is real courage that knows how to face facts and live beyond them."
on Courage
"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough Without ever having felt sorry for itself."
"I can never decide whether my dreams are the result of my thoughts, or my thoughts the result of my dreams."
on Dreams
"Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot."
"The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure."
on Nature
"Ethics and equity and the principles of justice do not change with the calendar."
"One's action ought to come out of an achieved stillness: not to be a mere rushing on."
on Mindfulness
"Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling his own soul."
"A young man is afraid of his demon and pulls his hand over the demon's mouth sometimes and speaks for him."
on Fear
"The mighty question arises upon us, what is one's own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be."
on Identity
"That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere."
on Philosophy
