Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes
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W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.
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The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.
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Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.
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A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.
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It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers.
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Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult ... one saw how very little body there was underneath.
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In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.
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When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.
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This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.
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There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.
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We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.