Jean Toomer famous quotes

03-30-2025

Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.
-- Jean Toomer
Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.
-- Jean Toomer

#Novices #Masters
We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
-- Jean Toomer

#Life #Experience #Rope
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

#Dream #Thinking #Enough
We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.
-- Jean Toomer

#Philosophical #Existence #Humans
We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.
-- Jean Toomer

#Imagination #Missing #Enough
Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.
-- Jean Toomer

#Mean #Acceptance #Prevailing
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

#Dream #Giving #Singers
Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.
-- Jean Toomer

#Faults #Impatience #Egotism
Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.
-- Jean Toomer

#Running #Men #Wish
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

#Rivers #Curves #Feelings
Dripping rain like golden honey- And the sweet earth flying from the thunder
-- Jean Toomer

#Sweet #Rain #Flying
Whatever I believed, I did; I did with my whole heart and mind as far as possible to do so...
-- Jean Toomer

#Dream #Heart #Mind
In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.
-- Jean Toomer

#Art #Get Well #Sick
We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them.
-- Jean Toomer

#Merit
To understand a new idea, break an old habit.
-- Jean Toomer

#Ideas #Old Habits #Habit
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

#Priorities #Faithful #Sacred
There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them. No one should want to. Perfect joy, or perfect pain, with no contrasting element to define them, would mean a monotony of consciousness, would mean death
-- Jean Toomer

#Pain #Mean #Perfect
Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers
-- Jean Toomer

#Flower #Bells #Thunder
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

#School #Men #Creative
No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.
-- Jean Toomer

#Eye #Sight
People mistake their limitations for high standards.
-- Jean Toomer

#Mistake #People #High Standards
I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.
-- Jean Toomer

#Might #Poet #Conscious
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

#Doubt #Earth #Enough
But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come.
-- Jean Toomer

#Ems #Matter #Dice
Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?
-- Jean Toomer

#Hurt #It Hurts #Ugliness
It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.
-- Jean Toomer

#Lifetime #Wells
Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.
-- Jean Toomer

#Men #Justice #Social Justice
The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.
-- Jean Toomer

#Ignorance #Knowing #Justice

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