Samuel Quotes

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

What you are will make you what you will become.

There is a sense of decency that's like a barometer to a man's or a country's health.

I took my writing seriously, and it seemed to pay off.

Reality must prove itself again and again to questioners ... it is the fantasy which goes on without contradiction, without having to prove itself.

Spending practically every minute of your day on pure survival is an absolutely boring life.

Suggestion is a literary strategy.

Discourse says, 'You are.' Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, 'I am not.

Like contemporary poetry, philosophy is one of those things, especially at the beginning stages, most people would rather do than study - which is why most of what gets done is so impoverished.

The emblem of a philosophy is not that it contains a set of specific thoughts , but that it generates a way of thinking.

I suspect most of life takes place in the interstices of what's already been articulated.

Honesty is the best policy ; a policy is, after all, a strategy for living in the polis in the city.

If you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.

A number of things in Dhalgren are just meant to function as mysteries. They're mysteries when the book begins, and they're mysteries when the book ends.

Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.

Human beings being what they are, order spreads, given half a chance, almost as fast as confusion.

As a prose writer, I work with language; and those who work with language turn to poetry for renewal.

The General Public is a statistical fiction created by a few exceptional men to make the loneliness of being exceptional a little easier to bear.

It's frightening for one artist to see another one, any other one turn away from art.

For tutors, although they may make youth learned, do not always make them virtuous.

To vanish in the chinks that Time has made.

I hang by a thread, but it is (if I may so speak) of Christ's spinning

Heaven is a house full of miracles; yea, of spectacles and images of free grace.

Grow as a palm-tree on God's Mount Zion; howbeit shaken with winds, yet the root is fast.

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials.

The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.

The cheapest of all things is kindness, its exercise requiring the least possible trouble and self-sacrifice. Win hearts, said Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, and you have all men's hearts and purses.

To be beloved is all I need, And whom I love, I love indeed.

Experience informs us that the first defence of weak minds is to recriminate.

In many ways doth the full heart reveal The presence of the love it would conceal.

Good and bad men are each less so than they seem.

Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

All nature seems at work.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.

Contempt is egotism in ill- humor.

But oh! each visitation Suspends what nature gave me any my birth, My shaping spirit of Imagination.

There is small chance of truth at the goal, where there is not childlike humility at the starting-post.

Mr. Mum's Rudesheimer And the church of St. Geryon Are the two things alone That deserve to be known In the body-and-soul-stinking town of Cologne.

Often do the spirits stride on before the event; and in today already walks tomorrow.

Farewell, farewell! but this I tell To thee, thou Wedding-Guest! He prayeth well, who loveth well Both man and bird and beast.

It is suicide to be abroad. But what it is to be at home, ... what it is to be at home? A lingering dissolution.

Every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.

How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life.

men do not suspect faults which they do not commit

We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?

Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you.

It is common to overlook what is near by keeping the eye fixed on something remote.

The man who is asked by an author what he thinks of his work is put to the torture and is not obliged to speak the truth.