Literature Quotes - Page 83

You don't say, like the Bush crowd, 'I got this guy over here and I don't like him and I'm gonna get him, whether you back me or not.'

Literature is a bad crutch, but a good walking-stick.

Look for joy in your life; it's not always easy to find.

May not the complaint, that common people are above their station, often take its rise in the fact of uncommon people being below theirs?

I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies; seldom safe to venture to instruct, even our friends.

In politics, as in religion, it so happens, that we have less charity for those who believe the half of our creed, than for those that deny the whole of it; since if Servetus had been a Mohammedan, he would not have been burnt by Calvin.

Contemporaries appreciate the person rather than their merit, posterity will regard the merit rather than the person.

The two most precious things this side of the grave are our reputation and our life. But it is to be lamented that the most contemptible whisper may deprive us of the one, and the weakest weapon of the other.

Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

I couldn't see myself filling some definite niche in what is called a career. This was all misty.

I make it clear why I write as I do and why other poets write as they do. After hundreds of experiments I decided to go my own way in style and see what would happen.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn it.

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself.

I have in later years taken to Euclid, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, in an elemental way.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

Courteousness is consideration for others; politeness is the method used to deliver such considerations.

Take without forgetting, and give without remembering.

Pity speaks to grief more sweetly than a band of instruments.

The month of January, we were number one. Now, this is something we're proud of, because we recognize we're up against a formidable operation there at CNN.

In America today, if your sensibilities are offended by something that has happened, you get an enormous amount of credibility and are taken very seriously.