Ideas are the old-age of art. Artists have to keep young; they must not think too much – thought is death, while art is life. Such was Emile’s viewpoint.
There can be no literary equivalent to truth.
We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.
Appearances do not deceive if there are enough of them.
I believe that misconceptions about oneself that one does not correct where possible act as a bad magic.
Every thought sounds like a footfall, Till a thought like a boot kicks down the wall.
Shakespeare alternated between musical surrenders to social prestige and magnificent fits of poetic remorse.
Every woman must live by some sense of victory over disappointments, and Olympias was not the sort of woman to find compensation in her own powers of self-control and endurance.
Woman is the symbol to man of the uncleanness of bodily existence, of which he purifies himself by putting her to noble uses. She thus has for him a double, contradictory significance; she is the subject of his bawdry and the subject of his romance.
All literature is written by the old to teach the young how to express themselves so that they in turn may write literature to teach the old how to express themselves. All literature is written by mentally precocious adolescents and by mentally precocious senescents.
Women are strangers in the country of man...
My function as a writer is not story-telling but truth-telling: to make things plain.
We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.
To tell one comprehensive story of how it has happened that what is is, one which shall hold true, come what may, now-after – a story that whatever comes shall perfectly continue or confirm: such is the ideal motive of religions.
Conversation succeeds conversation, Until there’s nothing left to talk about Except truth, the perennial monologue, And no talker to dispute it but itself.
Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.
The problem of good and evil is not the problem of good and evil, but only the problem of evil. In opposition to good there are evil characters, but there are no good characters in opposition to evil. Evil is arguable, but good is not. Therefore the Devil always wins the argument.
Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day’s doorstep.
In religion is much tiredness of people, a giving over of their doing to Someone Else.
A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever.