''If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.''
''How full of trifles everything is! It is only one's thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.''
''What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.''
''All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.''
''Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them.''
''Yet there is no spring in Florida, neither in boskage perdu, nor on the nunnery beaches.''
''Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.''
''New York is a field of tireless and antagonistic interests—undoubtedly fascinating but horribly unreal. Everybody is looking at everybody else—a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.''
''The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.''
''The genuine artist is never "true to life." He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.''
''Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.''
''A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.''
''To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.''
''One cannot spend one's time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be.''
''Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.''
''How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?''
''Unfortunately there is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of Spring in our blood.''
''It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, who, in the known alone, would shrivel up with boredom.''
''The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.''
''The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so.''
''Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.''
''Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.''
''A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.''
''Style is not something applied. It is something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress.''
''One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.''
''One's ignorance is one's chief asset.''
''The philosopher proves that the philosopher exists. The poet merely enjoys existence.''