It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.
Mysticism has been in the past and probably ever will be one of the great powers of the world and it is bad scholarship to pretend the contrary.
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.
No man has ever lived that had enough of children’s gratitude or woman’s love.
When such as I cast out remorse; So great a sweetness flows into the breast; We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blessed.
And God stands winding His lonely horn, And time and the world are ever in flight.
The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves The brilliant moon and all the milky sky And all that famous harmony of leaves Had blotted out man’s image and his cry.
And God, the herdsman, goads them on behind.
All that we did, all that we said or sang must come from contact with the soil.
Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.
Literature is always personal, always one man’s vision of the world, one man’s experience, and it can only be popular when men are ready to welcome the visions of others.
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 because of our quiet.
Now that my ladder’s gone, I must lie down where all my ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
Love comes in at the eye.
And the merry love the fiddle, and the merry love to dance.
A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote. A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat. So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.
Odor of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain And vain all Doric discipline.
This great purple butterfly, In the prison of my hands, Has a learning in his eye Not a poor fool understands.
The friends that have I do it wrong Whenever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.