Jean Toomer
Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.Collection: Fear
The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.
We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.
I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.
Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.
No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.
People mistake their limitations for high standards.
Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.
To understand a new idea, break an old habit.Collection: Inspirational
In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.Collection: Art
We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.Collection: Philosophy
We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them.Collection: Giving
The only way to seek God is to seek God first. Deny the nayward, affirm the yeaward, be true to those stirrings and motions which He starts in us, refuse priority to all else, and be faithful to the sacred.Collection: Priorities
We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.Collection: Imagination
There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean deathCollection: Pain
One may receive the information but miss the teaching.Collection: Teaching
Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.Collection: Men
Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.Collection: Faults
Whatever I believed, I did; I did with my whole heart and mind as far as possible to do so.Collection: Dream
Once a man has tasted creative action, then thereafter, no matter how safely he schools himself in patience, he is restive, acutely dissatisfied with anything else. He becomes as a lover to whom abstinence is intolerable.Collection: School
Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?Collection: Hurt
Perhaps . . . our lot on the earth is to seek and to search. Now and again we find just enough to enable us to carry on. I now doubt that any of us will completely find and be found in this life.Collection: Doubt
It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.Collection: Lifetime
O singers, resinous and soft your songsAbove the sacred whisper of the pines,Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.Collection: Dream
If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.Collection: Rivers