T. E. Hulme Quotes & Sayings

Here is the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir of possibilities, and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order, then these possibilities will have a chance, and you will get Progress. — T. E. Hulme

No history can be a faithful mirror. If it were, it would be as long and as dull as life itself. It must be a selection, and, being a selection, must inevitably be biased. — T. E. Hulme

Pure geometrical regularity gives a certain pleasure to men troubled by the obscurity of outside appearance. The geometrical line is something absolutely distinct from the messiness, the confusion, and the accidental details of existing things. — T. E. Hulme

The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. — T. E. Hulme

A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters. — T. E. Hulme

All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind. — T. E. Hulme

Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches. — T. E. Hulme

All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves. — T. E. Hulme

In the light of absolute values (religious or ethical) man himself is judged to be limited or imperfect, while he can occasionally accomplish acts which partake of perfection, he, himself can never be perfect. — T. E. Hulme

One of the main reasons for the existence of philosophy is not that it enables you to find truth (it can never do that) but that it does provide you a refuge for definitions. — T. E. Hulme

All clear cut ideas turn out to be wrong. — T. E. Hulme

Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept — T. E. Hulme

Born with blue spectacles, you would think the world was blue and never be conscious of the existence of the distorting glass. — T. E. Hulme

There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered. — T. E. Hulme

Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images. — T. E. Hulme

All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted. — T. E. Hulme

Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him. — T. E. Hulme

The first time I ever felt the necessity or inevitableness of verse, was in the desire to reproduce the peculiar quality of feeling which is induced by the flat spaces and wide horizons of the virgin prairie of western Canada. — T. E. Hulme

Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling. — T. E. Hulme

The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in ... He has not created something,he has seen something. — T. E. Hulme