Quotes from Irving Layton

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.

Whom the gods do not intend to destroy, they first make mad with poetry.

To this pass Christianity has come There is no God, and Jesus is his son.

In Pierre Elliott Trudeau Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.

Conscience: self-esteem with a halo.

Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.

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.

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.

Idealist: a cynic in the making.

I am a genius who has written poems that will survive with the best of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats.

My neighbor doesn't want to be loved as much as he wants to be envied.

We love in another's soul whatever of ourselves we can deposit in it; the greater the deposit, the greater the love.

Riding hard for glory.

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

Death is a name for beauty not in use.

Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.

Certainly he is not of the generation that regards honesty as the best policy. However, he does regard it as a policy. (On President Richard M Nixon)

Time flames like a paraffin stove / and what burns are the minutes I live.

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

We'll mark the butterflies disappearing over the hedge with tiny wristwatches on their wings: our fingers touching the earth, like two Buddhas

By walking I found out Where I was going. By intensely hating, how to love. By loving, whom and what to love. By grieving, how to laugh from the belly. Out of infirmity, I have built strength. Out of untruth, truth. From hypocrisy, I wove directness. Almost now I know who I am. Almost I have the boldness to be that man. Another step And I shall be where I started from.

The famous and rich, even the learned and wise, Singly or in pairs went to her dwelling To press their civilized lips to her thighs Or learn at first hand her buttocks' swelling "Old nicoise whore

Only the tiniest fracton of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them theyare free.

God is indeed dead. He died of self-horror when He saw the creature He had made in His own image.