74 Quotes by Conrad Aiken

We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain. We do not remember the red roots whence we rose, but we know that we rose and walked, that after a while we shall lie down again.

He whose first emotion, on the view of an excellent work, is to undervalue or depreciate it, will never have one of his own to show.

For in this walk, this voyage, it is yourself, the profound history of your 'self,' that now as always you encounter.

Poetry will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know.

As poetry is the highest speech of man, it can not only accept and contain, but in the end express best everything in the world, or in himself, that he discovers. It will absorb and transmute, as it always has done, and glorify, all that we can know. This has always been, and always will be, poetry's office.

One cricket said to another - come, let us be ridiculous, and say love! love love love love love let us be absurd, woman, and say hate! hate hate hate hate hate and then let us be angelic and say nothing.

Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!— But time goes on, and will, unheeding, Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn, And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

I think it's very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself.

Time is a dream ... a destroying dream; It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas; It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.