124 quotes
The people who live my truth, what do they say when they speak of themselves? Does the echo of what I am thinking issue from their mouths, or error, or falsehood?
The Inferno (1917)
Who shall compose the Bible of human desire, the terrible and simple Bible of that which drives us from life to life, the Bible of our doings, our goings, our original fall?
The Inferno (1917)
Turn where you will, everywhere, the man and the woman ever confronting each other, the man who loves a hundred times, the woman who has the power to love so much and to forget so much.
The Inferno (1917)
Our heart is not made for the abstract formula of happiness, since the truth of things is not made for it either. It beats for emotion and not for peace. Such is the gravity of the truth.
Light (1919)
The poet seemed to be searching for something, to be seeing things, and believing infinitely. He was in another world where everything we see is true and everything we say is unforgettable.
The Inferno (1917)
Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse.
Light (1919)
I had seen Jesus Christ on the margin of the lake. He came like an ordinary man along the path.
Light (1919)
I felt the beginning of a farewell rise in me like a sob. But there are too many of them for one to mourn them all.
Light (1919)
We have the divinity of our great misery. And our solitude, with its toilsome ideas, tears and laughter, is fatally divine.
The Inferno (1917)
I think of myself, of all that I am. Myself, my home, my hours; the past, and the future, — it was going to be like the past!
Light (1919)
The emptied towns and the villages destroyed, they are a wilderness of our making. Yes, war is all of us, and all of us together.
Under Fire (1916)
I have heard the annunciation of whatever finer things are to come. Through me has passed, without staying me in my course, the Word which does not lie, and which, said over again, will satisfy.
The Inferno (1917)
To understand life, and love it to its depths in a living being, that is the being's task, and that his masterpiece; and each of us can hardly occupy his time so greatly as with one other; we have only one true neighbor down here.
Light (1919)
All that we can remember is almost nothing. Memory is greater than we are, but memory is living and mortal as well.
Light (1919)
It is not only a right; it is a virtue.
Light (1919)
We are in a great night of the world.
Light (1919)
I wanted to know the secret of life.
The Inferno (1917)
What I am looking for is life.
Light (1919)
I tell them that fraternity is a dream, an obscure and uncertain sentiment; that while it is unnatural for a man to hate one whom he does not know, it is equally unnatural to love him.
Under Fire (1916)
I am not slighting intellect; but life is common to us along with poorer living things than ourselves. He who kills an animal, however lowly it may be, unless there is necessity, is an assassin.
Light (1919)