Jean Toomer Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Jean Toomer
Growing is a stern taking and eliminating, as relentless as life itself.

Jean Toomer
The aim is not to measure effort but to make it.

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

Jean Toomer
In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.

Jean Toomer
Men are inclined to either work without hope or to hope without work.

Jean Toomer
Unlock the races, Open this pod by outgrowing it, Free men from this prison and shrinkage, Not from the reality itself But from our prejudices and preferences And the enslaving behavior caused by them, Eliminate these— I am, we are, simply of the human race.

Jean Toomer
Values and meanings, though intangible, are held by everyone consciously or unconsciously as the most real and the most important.

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

Jean Toomer
Fear is a noose that binds until it strangles.

Jean Toomer
Conscience, the heart of the human world, still beats feebly in our sense of decency.

Jean Toomer
A symbol is as useful to the spirit as a tool is to the hand.

Jean Toomer
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.

Jean Toomer
And we are the old people, witnesses
That behind us there extends
An unbroken chain of ancestors,
Ourselves linked with all who ever lived,
Joined with all future generations.

Jean Toomer
The desire to be has become the desire to belong.

Jean Toomer
Wind is in the cane. Come along.
Cane leaves swaying, rusty with talk,
Scratching choruses above the guinea's squawk, Wind is in the cane. Come along.

Jean Toomer
Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.

Jean Toomer
O singers, resinous and soft your songs
Above the sacred whisper of the pines,
Give virgin lips to cornfield concubines,
Bring dreams of Christ to dusky cane-lipped throngs.

Jean Toomer
What use bombs and anti-bombs,
Sovereign powers, brutal lives, ugly deaths?
Are men born to go down like this?

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

Jean Toomer
A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk songs from soul sounds.

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

Jean Toomer
Beyond plants are animals,
Beyond animals is man,
Beyond man is the universe.
The Big Light,
Let the Big Light in!

Jean Toomer
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.

Jean Toomer
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds,
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade

Jean Toomer
O can't you see it, O can't you see it,
Her skin is like dusk on the eastern horizon... When the sun goes down.

Jean Toomer
One seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.

Jean Toomer