Quotes by Jean Toomer

“We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.”

“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.”

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

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

“People mistake their limitations for high standards.”

“The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.”

“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.”

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

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

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

Call them from their houses, and teach them to dream.

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

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.

No eyes that have seen beauty ever lose their sight.