Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.
Where does rain come from? It comes from all the dirty water that evaporates from the earth, like urine and the water you throw out after washing your feet. Isn't it wonderful how the sky can take that dirty water and change it into pure, clean water? Your mind can do the same with your defilements if you let it.
The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot. I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping In sight, then lost amidst the forestry Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy; A huge, dun cupola, like a fools-cap crown On a fool's head - and there is London Town.
I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.