T. E. Hulme Quotes
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Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.
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Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass.
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No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased.
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Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things.
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All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.
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Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress.
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All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind.
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The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
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My objection to metre is that it enables people to write verse with no poetic inspiration.
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Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.
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The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.
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Poetry is no more, no less than a mosaic of words, so great exactness is required for each one.
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A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.
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It is a delicate & difficult art fitting rhythm to an idea...communicating momentary phases in a poet's mind.
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All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.
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The unit of significance in the poem is not the word but the phrase or sentence...a poet should consider the effect of the whole poem, not its local felicities.
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Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.
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The prose writer drags meaning along with a rope, the poet makes it stand out and hit you.
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If literature (realistic) did really resemble life, it would be interminable, dreary, commonplace eating and dressing, buttoning, with here and there a patch of vividness. Life is composed of exquisite moments and the rest is shadows of them.
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There were certain impressions I wanted to fix. I read verse models but none seemed to suitably express that kind of impression..until I came to read French vers libre which seemed to eactly fitr the case.
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Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.
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In the light of absolute values (religious or ethical) man himself is judged to be limited or imperfect, while he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he, himself can never be perfect.
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There is nothing to do but keep on.
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Prose is in fact the museum where the dead images of verse are preserved. In 'Notes', prose is 'a museum where all the old weapons of poetry kept.