The Creative LifeBoni and Liveright, 1924 - 200 pages |
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Common terms and phrases
action American answer artist beauty become beginning better called character comfort common conformity consciousness conventional creative CRITIC dangerous deal desire difference doubt eternal experience expression face fact fate fear fellow fiction force freedom give Goethe happy ending heart Hence hope human idealism ideas imagination inner intellectual intelligent interpretation kind learned least less liberal literature live look mankind matter means method mind moral nature never novel novelist once passion past perhaps period PHILOSOPHER play poet poetry possible practice problem PRODUCERS PROFESSOR prose reality reason remains seek seems sense soul speak speech spirit stories symbols takes theater things thought tion true truth turn unique universe values verse vision whole write written young
Popular passages
Page 187 - And consider green and violet and the tufted crown intentional, And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not something else, And the jay in the woods never studied the gamut, yet trills pretty well to me, And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.
Page 204 - One method of delivery alone remains to us which is simply this: we must lead men to the particulars themselves, and their series and order; while men on their side must force themselves for a while to lay their notions by and begin to familiarize themselves with facts.
Page 174 - It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom ; or that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established; that he may neither violate essential principles by a desire of novelty, nor debar himself from the attainment of beauties within his view, by a needless fear of breaking rules which no literary dictator had authority to enact.
Page 181 - They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then from the devil.' No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is •what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.
Page 203 - But because a man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search. of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road, I shall set down the reasons that made me doubt of the truth of that opinion, as an excuse for my mistake, if I be in one; which I leave to be considered by those who, with me, dispose themselves to embrace truth wherever they find it.
Page 187 - Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
Page 90 - Goethe's task was, — the inevitable task for the modern poet henceforth is, — as it was for the Greek poet in the days of Pericles, not to preach a sublime sermon on a given text like Dante, not to exhibit all the kingdoms of human life and the glory of them like Shakspeare, but to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it.
Page 186 - I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Page 206 - I have never affected anything in my poetry. I have never uttered anything which I have not experienced, and which has not urged me to production. I have only composed love songs when I have loved. How could I write songs of hatred without hating ! And, between ourselves, I did not hate the French, although I thanked God that we were free from them.
Page 188 - I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open.