David Teems > David's Quotes

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
― Thomas Wolfe, God's Lonely Man

“Parts are not to be examined till the whole has been surveyed; there is a kind of intellectual remoteness necessary for the comprehension of any great work in its full design and its true proportions; a close approach shews the smaller niceties, but the beauty of the whole is discerned no longer.”
― Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare

“Excellence does not require perfection.”
― Henry James

“She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don’t know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.”
― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

“True criticism is the reflection of the thing criticized upon the spirit of the critic”
― Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography

“From a drop of water," said the writer, "a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Ultimate Collection

“A man is really alive only when he delights in the good-will of others.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

“but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.”
― Rumi, The Essential Rumi

“And so, the secret in Taoism is to get out of one’s own way, and to learn that this pushing ourselves, instead of making us more efficient, actually interferes with everything we set about to do.”
― Alan W. Watts, What Is Tao?

“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”
― Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“If a poem hasn't ripped apart your soul; you haven't experienced poetry.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.”
― Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

“I am deeply convinced that no man, however wide his erudition, however patient his antiquarian researches, can possibly understand, or be worthy of understanding, the writings of Shakespeare.”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, SHAKESPEARE, THE DRAMA & THE STAGE: Coleridge's Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare and Other Old Poets and Dramatists

“The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.”
― Robert Frost