77 Quotes by Laura Riding

To a poet the mere making of a poem can seem to solve the problem of truth, but only a problem of art is solved in poetry.

The end of poetry is not to create a physical condition which shall give pleasure to the mind... The end of poetry is not an after-effect, not a pleasurable memory of itself, but an immediate, constant and even unpleasant insistence upon itself.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

When ... I comprehended that poetry had no provision in it for ultimate practical attainment of the rightness of work that is truth, but led on ever only to a temporizing less- than-truth ... I stopped.

Evil I had never found satisfactorily placeable as an integral element of the universal, or total, content of existence. Indeed, evil is evil just because there is no logical place for it, no room in reality for it. It is unreal, and yet real as something unreal.

learning can be a bridge between doing and thinking. But then there is a danger that the person who uses learning as a bridge between doing and thinking may get stuck in learning and never get on to thinking ...

rummaging in the storehouses of religious or literary history for myth-matter for ideational uses is of the nature of spiritual vulgarity.

Myth is a tale once believed as truth; believed, it is not myth, but religion. A tale once religiously believed that has come to be called a myth is something of religion corrupted with disbelief. What are beliefs for some societies but myths for others cannot fill spiritual vacancies in the life of those others.

Poetry is a sleep-maker for that which sits up late in us listening for the footfall of the future on to-day's doorstep.