Quotes from William Matthews

Unless a man has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous.

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem, and it was miserable, for that's how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat literature. [from "Mingus at the Showplace"]

Listen, / my wary one, it's far too late / to unlove each other.

God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.

As frost, raised to its utmost intensity, produces the sensation of fire, so any good quality, overwrought and pushed to excess, turns into its own contrary.

The power of music that poetry lacks is the ability to persuade without argument.

The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles... are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.

The same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man's spirit, embitter another's.

The first law of success ... is concentration: to bend all the energies to one point, and to go directly to that point, looking neither to the right nor the left.

The easiest way for me to lose interests is to know too much of what I want to say before I begin.

Be methodical if you would succeed in business, or in anything. Have a work for every moment, and mind the moment's work.

One well-cultivated talent deepened and enlarged is worth one hundred shallow faculties.