T.E. Hulme Quotes

You want to know about anybody? See what books they read, and how they've been read.

Never forget that God tests his real friends more severely than the lukewarm ones.

But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk.

I am in limbo, and in limbo there are no races, no prizes, no changes, no chances. There are merely degrees of endurance, and endurance never was my strong point.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing.

Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

There is a time, when passing through a light, that you walk in your own shadow.

It's not a question of doing the best thing for the environment - the best thing for the environment is for people to stop using vast amounts of energy.

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in... He has not created something, he has seen something.

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

It's the possibility that when you're dead you might still go on hurting that bothers me.

You must never lose the awareness that in yourself you are nothing, you are only an instrument. An instrument is nothing until it is lifted.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise - that which is common to you, me, and everybody.

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.

I have faced Death. I have been caught in the wild weed tangles of Her hair, seen the gleam of her jade eyes. I will go when it is time - no choice! - but now I want life.

I am not dead yet! I can still call forth a piece of soul and set it down in color, fixed forever.

Self-evidently, dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking.

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions.

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

The smarter you are, the more you know, the less reason you have to trust or love or confide.

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

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.

I am exceedingly angry for no good reason.

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.

The company you keep at death is, of all things, most dependent on chance.

Wars of small kingdoms and forgotten lands, what do chessmen dream of in the dark?

Poverty, chastity, and obedience are extremely difficult. But there are always the graces if you will pray for them.

She has this curious heavy grace, like something out of its element making do in a heavier medium. Like she should be living in water.

Poverty chastity and obedience are extremely difficult. But there are always the graces if you will pray for them.

You must never lose the awareness that in yourself you are nothing you are only an instrument. An instrument is nothing until it is lifted.

God tests His real friends more severely than the lukewarm ones.

Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

I know about me. I am the moons sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.

The color has faded out of the sky. It is grey, becoming darker as the world turns herself round a little more. The clouds are long and black and ragged, like the wings of stormbattered dragons.

Sometimes, the waves grow hushed, but the sea is always there, touching, caressing, eating the earth...