1. “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
2. “Concern with morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.”
3. “Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.”
4. “...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.”
5. "Language is a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes to make the bears dance, when what we long for is to move the stars to pity."
6. “May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!”
7. “Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain?”
8. “Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.”
9. “The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even about my doubts.”
10. “The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.”
11. ”There is no truth. There is only perception.”
12. “Whatever the thing you wish to say, there is but one word to express it, but one verb to give it movement, but one adjective to qualify it; you must seek until you find this noun, this verb, this adjective . . . . When you pass a grocer sitting in his doorway, a porter smoking a pipe, or a cab stand, show me that grocer and that porter . . . in such a way that I could never mistake them for any other grocer or porter, and by a single word give me to understand wherein the cab horse differs from fifty others before or behind it.”
