Alfred Bruce Douglas Quotes

What shall I say, what word, what cry recall,
What god invoke, what charm, what amulet,
To make a sonnet pay a hopeless debt,
Or heal a bruised soul with a madrigal?
O vanity of words! my cup of gall
O'erflows with this, I have no phrase to set,
And all my agony and bloody sweat
Comes to this issue of no words at all.

This is my book, and in my book my soul
With its two woven threads of joy and pain,
And both were yours before they were begun.
Oh! that this dream would like a mist unroll,
That I might look upon your face again,
And hear your kind voice say: 'This was well done.

To ransom one lost moment with a rhyme!
Or if fate and grudging gods demure,
To clutch Life's hair, and thrust one naked phrase
Like a lean knife between the ribs of time.

It is heresy to say that we shall ever again produce a poet of Shakespeare's stature, but we have faith that when the spirit of man comes really to need another, he will be there.

He (Wilde) did succeed in weaving spells. One sat and listened to him enthralled. It all appeared to be Wisdom and Power and Beauty and Enchantment... But a man who has broken loose from a spell cannot look back on the enchantment again and recapture the illusion of the shattered spell. He can only, as I do, remember that it was so, and wonder, and perhaps shudder a little.

I defy anyone who retains the least spark of honour to spit on the real, essential love of one human being for another.

When you go to heaven you can be what you like and I intend to be a child.

The average woman is far braver than the average man. The common kind of courage-that of the soldier who disregards the danger of death-belongs to the majority of men in the last resort. I mean that if it has to be exercised they exercise it without making a fuss about it. But when you come to moral courage it hardly exists at all among men. There is only one man in ten thousand who will brave the full violence of public opinion. Women, on the other hand, will often do it, if they are in love or to defend their children... The bravest men are those who have a good deal of woman about them.

I am the Love that Dare not Speak its Name

The poet wishes to strike beautiful notes, not new notes... To ask or expect a poet to strike a new note in poetry is exactly like asking or expecting the Nightengale to strike a new note in her perennial song.

I have often behaved badly and I have often behaved foolishly; but, as it happens, I find that on the whole, the things that I have been most blamed for are exactly the things I would do again to-morrow if I had the chance. The things I regret are, generally speaking, the occasional compromises and the (infrequent) runnings away from high attitudes which I failed to carry through to their ends. In short, what I regret in my life is just that part of it which worldly wisdom applauds… A thing does not become right because the world says it is right, any more than it becomes wrong because the world says it is wrong. One can act only according to one's lights and if one is in good faith, one may hope that in the long run justification will result, even if not in this world or in one's own lifetime.