Jean Toomer Quotes

#1. Dusk, suggesting the almost imperceptible posession of giant trees, settled with a purple haze about the cane. I felt strange, as I always do in Georgia, particularly at dusk. I felt that things unseen to men were tangibly immediate. It would not have surprised me had I had a vision.

Jean Toomer

#2. Some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

Jean Toomer

#3. People mistake their limitations for high standards.

Jean Toomer

#4. Once a man has tasted creative action, then thereafter, no matter how safely he schools himself in patience, he is restive, acutely dissatisfied with anything else. He becomes as a lover to whom abstinence is intolerable.

Jean Toomer

#5. O singers, resinous and soft your songsAbove the sacred whisper of the pines,Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

Jean Toomer

#6. Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.

Jean Toomer

#7. We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.

Jean Toomer

#8. The only way to seek God is to seek God first. Deny the nayward, affirm the yeaward, be true to those stirrings and motions which He starts in us, refuse priority to all else, and be faithful to the sacred.

Jean Toomer

#9. Talk about it only enough to do it. Dream about it only enough to feel it. Think about it only enough to understand it. Contemplate it only enough to be it.

Jean Toomer

#10. We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.

Jean Toomer

#11. Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.

Jean Toomer

#12. One may receive the information but miss the teaching.

Jean Toomer

#13. Perhaps ... our lot on the earth is to seek and to search. Now and again we find just enough to enable us to carry on. I now doubt that any of us will completely find and be found in this life.

Jean Toomer

#14. No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.

Jean Toomer

#15. To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

Jean Toomer

#16. Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.

Jean Toomer

#17. We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them.

Jean Toomer

#18. But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em,
there's times when they jes wont
come.

Jean Toomer

#19. We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.

Jean Toomer

#20. Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

Jean Toomer

#21. Whatever I believed, I did; I did with my whole heart and mind as far as possible to do so ...

Jean Toomer

#22. Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?

Jean Toomer

#23. In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.

Jean Toomer

#24. You are the most sleepiest man I ever seed.

Jean Toomer

#25. Night winds in Georgia are vagrant poets, whispering.

Jean Toomer

#26. I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.

Jean Toomer

#27. Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

Jean Toomer

#28. Dripping rain like golden honey-
And the sweet earth flying from the thunder

Jean Toomer

#29. If you have heard a Jewish cantor sing, if he has touched you and made your own sorrow seem trivial when compared with his, you will know my feeling when I follow the curves of her profile, like mobile rivers, to their common delta.

Jean Toomer

#30. The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.

Jean Toomer

#31. It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.

Jean Toomer

#32. Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads,
Great, hollow, bell-like flowers

Jean Toomer

#33. Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.

Jean Toomer

#34. O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines

Jean Toomer

#35. Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.

Jean Toomer