Sarton Quotes & Sayings

I can understand people simply fleeing the mountainous effort Christmas has become ... but there are always a few saving graces and finally they make up for all the bother and distress. — May Sarton

Hellenic science is a victory of rationalism, which appears greater, not smaller, when one is made to realize that it had been won in spite of the irrational beliefs of the Greek people; all in all, it was a triumph of reason in the face of unreason. Some knowledge of Greek superstitions is needed not only for a proper appreciation of that triumph but also for the justification of occasional failures, such as the many Platonic aberrations. — George Sarton

Science is the most revolutionary force in the world. — George Sarton

Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self. — May Sarton

Schubert Impromptus that Louise Bogan gave me - Opus 90 and Opus 142, Gieseking. — May Sarton

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year. — May Sarton

I love giving flowers. It is so deliciously unlasting and romantic. — May Sarton

Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the universal - and these balances are shifting all the time. — May Sarton

What is there to do when people die - people so dear and rare - but bring them back by remembering? — May Sarton

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. — May Sarton

I would predicate that in all great works of genius masculine and feminine elements in the personality find expression, whether this androgynous nature is played out sexually or not. — May Sarton

The woman who needs to create works of art is born with a kind of psychic tension in her which drives her unmercifully to find a way to balance, to make herself whole. Every human being has this need: in the artist it is mandatory. Unable to fulfill it, he goes mad. But when the artist is a woman she fulfills it at the expense of herself as a woman. — May Sarton

When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me - that a person may be ultrasensitive and not warm. She was intensely curious and plied one with questions, teasing, charming questions that made the young person glow at being even for a moment the object of her attention. But I did feel at times as though I were "a specimen American young poet" to be absorbed and filed away in the novelist's store of vicarious experience. Then one had also the daring sense that anything could be said, the sense of freedom that was surely one of the keys to the Bloomsbury ethos, a shared secret amusement at human folly or pretensions. She was immensely kind to have seen me for at least one tea, as she did for some years whenever I was in England, but in all that time I never felt warmth, and this was startling. — May Sarton

The Hellenistic world was international to a degree, polyglot and inspired by many religious faiths ... the Greek ideals were pagan and the Hellenistic age witnessed their death struggle against Asiatic and Egyptian mysteries , on the one side, and against Judaism , on the other. — George Sarton

The value of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression ... — May Sarton

I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and "the house and I resume old conversations". — May Sarton

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it. — May Sarton

A deed happens in a definite place at a definite time, but if it be sufficiently great and pregnant, its virtue radiates everywhere in time and space. — George Sarton

Alive to the loving past She conjures her own. Nothing is wholly lost - Sun on the stone. And lilacs in their splendor Like lost friends Come back through grief to tell her Love never ends. — May Sarton

Gardening is the instrument of grace. — May Sarton

In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life. — May Sarton

The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing. — May Sarton

It is childish to assume that science began in Greece; the Greek "miracle" was prepared by millenia of work in Egypt, Mesopotamia and possibly in other regions. Greek science was less an invention than a revival. — George Sarton

If we are to understand the human condition, and if we are to accept ourselves in all the complexity, self-doubt, extravagance of feeling, guilt, joy, the slow freeing of the self to its full capacity for action and creation, both as human being and as artist, we have to know all we can about each other, and we have to be willing to go naked. — May Sarton

Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated. — May Sarton

How unnatural the imposed view, imposed by a puritanical ethos, that passionate love belongs only to the young, that people are dead from the neck down by the time they are forty, and that any deep feeling, any passion after that age, is either ludicrous or revolting! — May Sarton

I can tell you that solitude
Is not all exaltation, inner space
Where the soul breathes and work can be done.
Solitude exposes the nerve,
Raises up ghosts.
The past, never at rest, flows through it. — May Sarton

When it comes to the important things one is always alone ... — May Sarton

I sometimes think men don't 'hear' very well, if I take your meaning to be 'understand what is going on in a person.' That's what makes them so restful. Women wear each other out with their everlasting touching of the nerve. — May Sarton

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it. — May Sarton

I feel happy to be keeping a journal again. I've missed it, missed naming things as they appear, missed the half hour when I push all duties aside and savor the experience of being alive in this beautiful place. — May Sarton

I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward — May Sarton

It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the artists. Or is it always so? The poets who are most ardently on the people's side write in such a way that the people cannot see rhyme nor reason to their work. — May Sarton

Help us to be ever faithful gardeners of the spirit, who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, and without light nothing flowers. — May Sarton

There are some griefs so loud
They could bring down the sky,
And there are griefs so still
None knows how deep they lie,
Endured, never expended.
There are old griefs so proud
They never speak a word;
They never can be mended.
And these nourish the will
And keep it iron-hard. — May Sarton

The body is a universe in itself and must be held as sacred as anything in creation ... It is dangerous to forget the body as sacramental. — May Sarton

I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, 'won't go,' or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person's face. — May Sarton

We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment. — May Sarton

So this was fame at last! Nothing but a vast debt to be paid to the world in energy, blood, and time. — May Sarton

Light is snow sifted / To an abstraction. — May Sarton

The most malicious kind of hatred is that which is built upon a theological foundation. — George Sarton

We have to make myths of our lives, the point being that if we do, then every grief or inexplicable seizure by weather, woe, or work can-if we discipline ourselves and think hard enough-be turned to account, be made to yield further insight into what it is to be alive, to be a human being. — May Sarton

What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read. — May Sarton

We only keep what we lose. — May Sarton

Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels. — May Sarton

There are but few saints amongst scientists, as among other men, but truth itself is a goal comparable with sanctity. — George Sarton

Women's work is always toward wholeness. — May Sarton

I had found one of the places on earth where any sensitive being feels exposed to powerful invisible forces and himself suddenly naked and attacked on every side by air, light, space - all that brings the soul close to the surface. There the poems flowed out. — May Sarton

[In old age] there is a childlike innocence, often, that has nothing to do with the childishness of senility. The moments become precious ... — May Sarton

It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through - the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or another. — May Sarton

Though friendship is not quick to burn it is explosive stuff. — May Sarton

Is it perhaps the one necessity of love, that it be needed? And the one great human tragedy that it so rarely is? — May Sarton

Human relations just are not fixed in their orbits like the planets
they're more like galaxies, changing all the time, exploding into light for years, then dying away. — May Sarton

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much. — May Sarton

My main interest ... is the love of truth, whether pleasant or not. Truth is self-sufficient, and there is nothing to which it can be subordinated without loss. When truth is made subservient to anything else, however great (say religion), it becomes impure and sordid. — George Sarton

I am obliged to deal with hundreds of men and to make them live without killing the reader. — George Sarton

When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes ... By mastering feelings, she had come to understand the meaning of discipline and its reward: freedom and power. — May Sarton

My gratitude to them [my first teachers] grows as I myself grow older. — George Sarton

Song

This is the love I bring,
Absolute and nothing:
A tree but with no roots,
A cloud heavy with fruit,
A wide stone stair
That leads nowhere
But to empty sky,
Ambiguous majesty.

This is the love I bear:
It is light as air,
Yet weighs like an earth;
It is water flowing,
Yet adamant as fire.
It is coming from going.
It is dying and growing.

A love so rare and hard
It cuts a diamond word
Upon the windowpane,
"Never, never again,
Never upon my breast,"
Having no time to bring,
Having no place to rest,
Absolute and nothing. — May Sarton

One must think like a hero merely to behave like a decent human being. — May Sarton

A bolt that raised her heart to blazing height
And made the vertical the very thrust of hope,
And found its path at last
(Slow work of Grace). — May Sarton

My anger, because I am old, is considered a sign of madness or senility. Is this not cruel? Are we to be deprived even of righteous anger? Is even irritability to be treated as a "symptom"? There — May Sarton

There was such a thing as women's work and it consisted chiefly, Hilary sometimes thought, in being able to stand constant interruption and keep your temper ... — May Sarton

One does not "find oneself" by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine ... who one is and wants to be. — May Sarton

When grace is given it comes to us as joy, maybe, but it can also be earned, I am convinced, through the rigorous examination of the sources of pain. — May Sarton

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. — May Sarton

Women are at last becoming persons first and wives second, and that is as it should be. — May Sarton

The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon, free to be an enfant terrible. He must above all never worry about this effect on other people. — May Sarton

We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be. — May Sarton

May Sarton said, "the deeper you go, the more universal you become." It's a reminder to me that those things I try to convince myself I don't need to admit are usually those things I need the most to say. Speaking the truth, in its most poignant details, is liberating and gives those around us the freedom to be real. — Sabrina Ward Harrison

A poet never feels useful. — May Sarton

It feels a long way up and down from zero. — May Sarton

The rationalism of the creative minds was tempered by abundant fantasies, and the supreme beauty of the monuments was probably spoiled by the circumambient vanities and ugliness; in a few cases the Greeks came as close to perfection as it was possible to do, yet they were human and imperfect. — George Sarton

My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note! — May Sarton

The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to poets ... Power requires that the inner person never be unmasked. No, we poets have to go naked. And since this is so, it is better that we stay private people; a naked public person would be rather ridiculous, what? — May Sarton

Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can. — May Sarton

Nobody stays special when they're old, Anna. That's what we have to learn. — May Sarton

Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical. — George Sarton

Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as "irrelevant"? When — May Sarton

Instant intimacy was too often followed by disillusion. — May Sarton

It would be foolish to give credit to Euclid for pangeometrical conceptions; the idea of geometry deifferent from the common-sense one never occurred to his mind. Yet, when he stated the fifth postulate, he stood at the parting of the ways. His subconscious prescience is astounding. There is nothing comperable to it in the whole history of science. — George Sarton

True feeling justifies whatever it may cost. — May Sarton

The means of choice:
She might choose to ascend
The falling dream,
By some angelic power without a name
Reverse the motion, plunge into upwardness,
Know height without an end,
Density melt to air, silence yield a voice
Within her fall she felt the pull of Grace. — May Sarton

I am not a greedy person except about flowers and plants, and then I become fanatically greedy. — May Sarton

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being. — May Sarton

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech ... — May Sarton

A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless. — May Sarton

I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal. — May Sarton

I reach and have reached the timeless moment, the pure suspension within time, only through love. — May Sarton

Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature. — May Sarton

The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive. — May Sarton

Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for half an hour opens the door into poetry? — May Sarton

Love is healing, even rootless love. — May Sarton

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death. — May Sarton

It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us. — May Sarton

The whole iconography of ancient science is simply the fruit of wishful thinking. — George Sarton

Fire is a good companion for the mind ... — May Sarton

Failure would only be if you had somewhere stopped growing. As far as I can see the whole duty of the artist is to keep on growing ... — May Sarton

I loved them in the way one loves at any age - if it's real at all - obsessively, painfully, with wild exaltation, with guilt, with conflict; I wrote poems to and about them; I put them into novels (disguised of course); I brooded upon why they were as they were, so often maddening, don't you know? I wrote them ridiculous letters. I lived with their faces. I knew their every gesture by heart. I stalked them like wild animals. I studied them as if they were maps of the world - and in a way, I suppose they were." She had spoken rapidly, on the defensive ... if he thought she didn't know what she was talking about! "Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one's own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self. — May Sarton

We cannot withdraw love without damaging ourselves. I have been badly hurt again but I see this morning that it does not really matter because I perceive the truth. Rage is the deprived infant in me but there is also a compassionate mother in me and she will come back with her healing powers in time. — May Sarton