Jean Toomer quotes:

We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.

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.

Most novices picture themselves as masters - and are content with the picture. This is why there are so few masters.

Acceptance of prevailing standards often means we have no standards of our own.

Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads, Great, hollow, bell-like flowers

To understand a new idea, break an old habit.

some genius of the South With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth, Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.

No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.

People mistake their limitations for high standards.

Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.

We start with gifts. Merit comes from what we make of them.

Dripping rain like golden honey- And the sweet earth flying from the thunder

Whatever I believed, I did; I did with my whole heart and mind as far as possible to do so...

But words is like th spots on dice: no matter how y fumbles em, there's times when they jes wont come.

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

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

We do not posses imagination enough to sense what we are missing.

It takes a well-spent lifetime, and perhaps more, to crystalize in us that for which we exist.

We never know we are beings till we love. And then it is we know the powers and potentialities of human existence.

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.

In a sick world, it is the first duty of the artist to get well.

Thank everyone who calls out your faults, your anger, your impatience, your egotism; do this consciously, voluntarily.

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.

The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.

Whats beauty anyway but ugliness if it hurts you?

One may receive the information but miss the teaching.

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.

Men are apt to idolize or fear that which they cannot understand, especially if it be a woman.

O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree, So scant of grass, so profligate of pines

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.

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.

I am not less poet; I am more conscious of all that I am, am not, and might become.