18 quotes
Tiresome as intellectuals can be, even they are probably much less menacing and pernicious to the world than anti-intellectuals.
The Search for Good Sense (1958)
Among the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry one of the commonest is the bookworm.
And how is clarity to be acquired? Mainly by taking trouble; and by writing to serve people rather than to impress them.
Style (1955)
Most of us know accurately only what we constantly relearn; memory is a dipsomaniac, needing to be perpetually refreshed.
Style (1955)
Self-determination must stop somewhere. In politics, as in physics, you come to a point where you cannot go on splitting things.
You cannot by any juggling with frontiers abolish racial minorities in Europe. And you cannot totally ignore geography. It follows that where you cannot move mountains you must move men.
A writer should remember that about his Muse there is a great deal of the Siren. He should view his mental offspring as relentlessly as a Spartan father — if it is not perfectly sound, let it be cast out.
Style (1955)
I know
Our spider-webs of wire are rust by now,
Our battlefields reconquered by the plough,
And hands that worked with mine, dust long ago.
The more populous the world and the more intricate its structure, the greater must be its fundamental insecurity. A world-structure too elaborately scientific, if once disrupted by war, revolution, natural cataclysm or epidemic, might collapse into a chaos not easily rebuilt.
The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (1960)
It seems to me as natural and necessary to keep notes, however brief, of one's reading, as logs of voyages or photographs of one's travels. For memory, in most of us, is a liar with galloping consumption.
The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (1960)
It is, I believe, personality above all that sets Virgil and Horace higher than Catullus and Ovid; Chaucer than Dryden; Shakespeare than his contemporaries. Many Elizabethans could write at times blank verse as enchanting as his; but he alone could conceive a Hamlet or an Imogen.
Style (1955)
You are sick of war, weary of entanglements. There are some who would have you renounce both. I offer you instead a heavier load of foreign responsibilities, a risk of new war. Because that is the only road to lasting peace.
In The Waste Land Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.
Vitality of mind and body; the activity to employ and maintain them; the zest and curiosity that they can animate; freedom to travel widely in nature and art, in countries of the world and countries of the mind; human affections; and the gift of gaiety – these seem to me, then, the main causes of happiness. I am surprised to find how few and simple they are.
The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (1960)
A skill once acquired — for example, the power to speak and write and enjoy one’s own language, or another — is less easily lost, more quickly recovered, than mere accumulations of facts. And it seems to me more important to go out into life able to think straight and communicate clearly than even to know — and remember — the contents of every English book since Caedmon. Then, like Medea, even if you lose everything else, you can still feel 'Myself remains'. Whereas stuffed geese, even if stuffed with the Universe, remain geese.
Style (1955)
Although beneath this grave-mound thy white bones now are lying,
Surely, my huntress Lycas, the wild things dread thee still.
The memory of thy worth tall Pêlion keeps undying,
And the looming peak of Ossa, and Cithæron’s lonely hill.
Considering what was to come, the much-abused 'theft' of the sculptures from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin was an undoubted blessing, though it was carelessly carried out, especially in removing the Caryatid from the Erechtheum; it would none the less be a graceful act for England to return them now to Athens.
I throw my apple towards you. If you will love me, take it
And give me in repayment your own maidenhead:
If your will is what I would not, yet keep it still; and make it
A lesson of how swiftly all loveliness is fled.