Irving Layton Quotes & Sayings

Conscience: self-esteem with a halo. — Irving Layton

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you. — Irving Layton

How seasonably
leaf and blossom uncurl
and living things arrange their death,
while someone from afar off
blows birthday candles for the world. — Irving Layton

Idealist: a cynic in the making. — Irving Layton

And me happiest when I compose poems:
Love, power, the huzza of battle
are something, are much:
yet a poem includes them like a pool
water and reflection. — Irving Layton

Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell. — Irving Layton

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope. — Irving Layton

I have stopped being a misanthrope. — Irving Layton

In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination. — Irving Layton

My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied. — Irving Layton

By walking, I found out where I was going. — Irving Layton

A poet is deeply conflicted and it's in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. The place is the harbor. It doesn't set the world in order, you know, it's the place of reconciliation. It's the Consolamentum, the kiss of peace. — Irving Layton

It amazes me that organs that piss Can give human beings such perfect bliss. — Irving Layton

To this pass Christianity has come There is no God, and Jesus is his son. — Irving Layton

Progress of a marriage: There was a time when you couldn't make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy. — Irving Layton

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry. — Irving Layton

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image. — Irving Layton

A Canadian is someone who keeps asking the question, 'What is a Canadian? — Irving Layton

Only the tiniest fracton of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them theyare free. — Irving Layton

We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it; the greater the deposit, the greater the love. — Irving Layton

Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live. — Irving Layton

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats. — Irving Layton

Death is a name for beauty not in use. — Irving Layton