the art of poetry

“The bourgeois novel is the greatest enemy of truth and honesty that was ever invented.” - J. G. Ballard, J.G. Ballard: Conversations

“If one doesn’t know his mistakes, he won’t want to correct them.” - Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius

“It might be plausibly maintained, that in almost every one of the leading controversies, past or present, in social philosophy, both sides were in the right in what they affirmed, though wrong in what they denied.” - John Stuart Mill, Dissertations and Discussions

“All that was once looked on as a function of the government is today called into question. Things are arranged more easily and more satisfactorily without the intervention of the state. And in studying the progress made in this direction, we are led to conclude that the tendency of the human race is to reduce government interference to zero; in fact, to abolish the state, the personification of injustice, oppression and monopoly.” - Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

“Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.” - Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

“Even if the sacrifices which are made to duty and virtue are painful to make, they are well repaid by the sweet recollections which they leave at the bottom of the heart.” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

“Men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.” - Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Experience, the name men give to their mistakes.” - Oscar Wilde, Vera; or, The Nihilists

“At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“I am your labyrinth.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters

“The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” - William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

“It don’t matter about all that anyway… You think it do, but it don’t. A man ain’t just his one talent… You got the talent of making others your kin, your blood. Music, well that’s different. I reckon it got its own worth, but it ain’t a man’s whole life.” - Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues

“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.” - Roald Dahl, The Twits

“We all have an old knot in the heart we wish to untie.” - Michael Ondaatje, The Cat’s Table

“I might have said the most intelligent and insightful things about the contexts and causes of my sufferings, my sickness of the soul, my bedevilment and neurosis—the mechanism was transparent to me. But it was not knowledge and understanding I needed, for which I yearned so desperately, but rather experience, decision, thrust and takeoff.” - Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.” - Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son