"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."

Man,

17

Create Your Own Wallpaper

Standard

Customized

"There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't."

Exlpore more Man quotes

"With prophecies the commentator is often a more important man than the prophet."

Georg C. Lichtenberg, German Physicist

Man,

"Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another."

Sigmund Freud, Austrian Psychologist

Man, Men, Society

"Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind."

Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Man, Right, Wind

"How little is the promise of the child fulfilled in the man."

Ovid, Roman Poet

Man, Promise

"A man can be himself only so long as he is alone."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Man,

"The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company."

Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Man, Men, Company, Grief

"The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea."

Ovid, Roman Poet

Man, Sea, Shipwreck

"So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you."

Seneca, Roman Philosopher

Man, Men, God, Statesman

"It's not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts."

Will Rogers, American Actor

Man,

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place."

Charles Baudelaire, French Poet

Man, Men, Poetry, Progress, Hate

Explore more quotes by John Updike

"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy."

Society

"But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography."

Writing

"Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper."

Progress

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness."

Humility

"Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief."

Lust

"And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?"

Anticipation

"On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence."

Observation

"Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties."

Divorce

"They've not forgotten him: worse, they never heard of him."

Obscurity

"We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe."

Existentialism