Gg > Gg's Quotes

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“There is no God.
But it does not matter.
Man is enough.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Selected Poetry

“Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles

“Searching my heart for its true sorrow,
This is the thing I find to be:
That I am weary of words and people,
Sick of the city, wanting the sea”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, Second April

“A ghost in marble of a girl you knew
Who would have loved you in a day or two.”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, A Few Figs from Thistles

“How first you knew me in a book I wrote,
How first you loved me for a written line”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay, The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems

“Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

“It was the sea that made me begin thinking secretly about love more than anything else; you know, a love worth dying for, or a love that consumes you. To a man locked up in a steel ship all the time, the sea is too much like a woman. Things like her lulls and storms, or her caprice, or the beauty of her breast reflecting the setting sun, are all obvious. More than that, you’re in a ship that mounts the sea and rides her and yet is constantly denied her. It’s the old saw about miles and miles of lovely water and you can’t quench your thirst. Nature surrounds a sailor with all these elements so like a woman and yet he is kept as far as a man can be from her warm, living body. That’s where the problem begins, right there—I’m sure of it.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace With the Sea

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I have drunken deep of joy,
And I will taste no other wine tonight.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
― Voltaire

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“Love truth, but pardon error.”
― Voltaire

“I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?”
― Voltaire, Candide, or, Optimism

“I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it."

(Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767)”
― Voltaire

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.”
― Voltaire

“Now, now my good man, this is no time to be making enemies."
(Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking him that he renounce Satan.)”
― Voltaire

“Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it.”
― Voltaire

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
― Harry Crosby, Transit of Venus

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
― T.S. Eliot

“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Books. Cats. Life is good.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books...”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.”
― Richard Wright

“If a man confessed anything on his death bed, it was the truth; for no man could stare death in the face and lie.”
― Richard Wright

“Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy