T. E. Hulme Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. All conviction - and so, necessarily, conversion - is based on the motor and emotional aspects of the mind.

T. E. Hulme

#4. Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches.

T. E. Hulme

#5. 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

#6. All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.

T. E. Hulme

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. There is no such thing as an absolute truth to be discovered.

T. E. Hulme

#12. 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

#13. All emotions are the ore from which poetry may be sifted.

T. E. Hulme

#14. Thought is prior to language and consists in the simultaneous presentation to the mind of two different images.

T. E. Hulme

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. Old houses were scaffolding once and workmen whistling.

T. E. Hulme

#18. The artist tries to see what there is to be interested in ... He has not created something,he has seen something.

T. E. Hulme

#19. All clear cut ideas turn out to be wrong.

T. E. Hulme

#20. Prose is a museum, where all the old weapons of poetry are kept

T. E. Hulme