“Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.”

Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.

Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing, the rest is mere sheep-herding.

From the colour the nature And by the nature the sign! Beatific spirits welding together As in one ash-tree in Ygdrasail.

Don’t be blinded by the theorists and a lying press.

Speak against unconscious oppression, Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative, Speak against bonds.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

Genius is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.

Bureaucrats are a pox. They are supposed to be necessary. Certain chemicals in the body are supposed to be necessary to life, but cause death the moment they increase beyond a suitable limit.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

The curse of me and my nation is that we always think things can be bettered by immediate action of some sort, any sort rather than no sort.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place In scaled invention or true artistry.

A little light, like a rushlight to lead back to splendour.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.