“With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.”

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.

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

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.

The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

One must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day was; one cannot judge life until death.

I know I’ll look back on these days and wonder why were some so hard? I know already that they’ll be, the best I’ve ever had. I know I’ll look back on these seemingly impossible days and wish for them back. And I’m finally starting to understand what it feels like to be really loved.

Living for today will bring about dying for today. You can’t just think, ‘I’m going to die anyway,’ because that’s what’s stopping us from moving forward.

The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them.

Every day we keep telling the same stories. Over and over. We forget that our endings can be different. So can the plot. I think it’s time for some surprise endings.

And didn’t I used to say “live fast, die young” right up until it was your last day too soon, with me under the sun.

I think fashion is like putting on armor. I like that aspect of it, but it’s not something I want to think about every day.

Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day.