“No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest- for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.”
“Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . .”
“The important fact is that for the man the act is eternal, and that for the brief space he has to live, he is already dead. He is already in a different world from ours. He has crossed the frontier. The important fact is that something is done which can not be undone-a possibility which none of us realize until we face it ourselves.”
“The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence can never retract.by this, and only this, we have existed.”
“An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. ”
“One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.”
“We wait, we wait,And the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints.Destiny waits in the hand of God, shaping the still unshapen:I have seen these things in a shaft of sunlight.Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmenWho do, some well, some ill, planning and guessing,Having their aims which turn in their hands in the pattern of time.”