Guy Davenport Quotes

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

Something of the previous state, however, survives every change. This is called in the language of cybernetics (which took it form the language of machines) feedback, the advantages of learning from experience and of having developed reflexes.

Theres nothing like being a soldier for confidence or learning your limits or enduring utter humiliation.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

The birds suffer their suffering each in a lifetime, forgetting it as they go.

A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world.

I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

When Heraclitus said that everything passes steadily along, he was not inciting us to make the best of the moment, an idea unseemly to his placid mind, but to pay attention to the pace of things. Each has its own rhythm: the nap of a dog, the procession of the equinoxes, the dances of Lydia, the majestically slow beat of the drums at Dodona, the swift runners at Olympia.