Irving Layton famous quotes

04-17-2025

When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.
-- Irving Layton

#Clever #Arguing #Argument
Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
-- Irving Layton

#Self #Madness #Misanthrope
A Canadian is someone who keeps asking the question, 'What is a Canadian?
-- Irving Layton

#Asking
Death is a name for beauty not in use.
-- Irving Layton

#Names #Use
It amazes me that organs that piss Can give human beings such perfect bliss.
-- Irving Layton

#Giving #Perfect #Bliss
Only the tiniest fracton of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them theyare free.
-- Irving Layton

#Want #Mankind
Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.
-- Irving Layton

#Self Esteem #Halos #Conscience
Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.
-- Irving Layton

#Mad #Firsts
And me happiest when I compose poems: Love, power, the huzza of battle are something, are much: yet a poem includes them like a pool water and reflection.
-- Irving Layton

#Reflection #Water #Poetry
how seasonably leaf and blossom uncurl and living things arrange their death, while someone from afar off blows birthday candles for the world.
-- Irving Layton

#Blow #World #Afar
We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it; the greater the deposit, the greater the love
-- Irving Layton

#Soul #Deposits
I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats
-- Irving Layton

#Genius #Wordsworth
Canadians look down on the United States and consider it Hell. They are right to do so. Canada is to the United States what, in Dante's scheme, Limbo is to Hell
-- Irving Layton

#United States #Looks #Canada
God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.
-- Irving Layton

#Self #Saws #Horror
My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied.
-- Irving Layton

#Want #Neighbor
By walking, I found out where I was going.
-- Irving Layton

#Found #Walking
Progress of a marriage: There was a time when you couldn't make me happy. Now the time has come when you can make me unhappy.
-- Irving Layton

#Progress #Unhappy #Make Me Happy
I have stopped being a misanthrope.
-- Irving Layton

#Misanthrope
Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.
-- Irving Layton

#Flames #Minutes #Stoves
Idealist: a cynic in the making.
-- Irving Layton

#Cynic #Idealist
An aphorism should be like a burr: sting, ... and leave a little soreness....
-- Irving Layton

#Littles #Aphorism #Should

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