William Empson famous quotes

07-19-2025

This world is good enough for me, if only I can be good enough for it.
-- William Empson

#World #Good Enough #Be Good
I'm afraid I take ... this rather clinical view of love: it's saving you from madness. I'm not so enthusiastic as other poets have been.
-- William Empson

#Views #Poetry #Literature
The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.
-- William Empson

#Art #Roots #Poetry
Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.
-- William Empson

#Men #Sea #Iron
Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend, Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end, Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend, Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?
-- William Empson

#Boys #Knowing #Waiting
Buddhists and Christians contrive to agree about death Making death their ideal basis for different ideals. The Communists however disapprove of death Except when practical.
-- William Empson

#Christian #Buddhist #Different
Liberal hopefulness Regards death as a mere border to an improving picture.
-- William Empson

#Borders #Hopefulness
To produce pure proletarian art the artist must be at one with the worker; this is impossible, not for political reasons, but because the artist never is at one with any public.
-- William Empson

#Art #Political #Impossible
All those large dreams by which men long live well Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell.
-- William Empson

#Dream #Men #Long
The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humors of others.
-- William Empson

#Accommodations #Forbearance #Temper
Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can't be solved by analysis.
-- William Empson

#Maintaining #Analysis #Contradiction
Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
-- William Empson

#Reading #Writing #Faces
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end. What is there to be or do? What's become of me or you? Are we kind or are we true? Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.
-- William Empson

#Boys #Two #Waiting
The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from your own.
-- William Empson

#People #Different #Literature
Poetry contains nothing haphazard.
-- William Empson
Proust has listed a great many reasons why it is impossible to be happy, but, in the course of being happy, one finds it difficult to remember them.
-- William Empson

#Impossible #Remember #Proust
Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills.
-- William Empson

#Blood #Effort #Waste
Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of men.
-- William Empson

#Men #Law #Long
It seems unpleasantly refined to put things off till someone knows.
-- William Empson
The heart of standing is that you cannot fly.
-- William Empson

#Heart #Standing

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