quotes from classic

Choose your companions from the best; Who draws a bucket with the rest soon topples down the hill.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

I agree about Shaw - he is haunted by the mystery he flouts. He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

An intellectual hatred is the worst.

more quotes from William Butler Yeats

In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Imprecision is tolerable and verisimilar in literature, because we always tend towards it in life.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics I refer to the infinite.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

My father and he had one of those English friendships which begin by avoiding intimacies and eventually eliminate speech altogether.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us ...

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Life and death have been lacking in my life.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Don't talk unless you can improve the silence.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

more quotes from Jorge Luis Borges

The value of old age depends upon the person who reaches it. To some men of early performance it is useless. To others, who are late to develop, it just enables them to finish the job.

more quotes from Thomas Hardy