Top 50 Edith Sitwell Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “There is no truth. Only points of view.”

— Edith Sitwell

2. “Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”

— Edith Sitwell

Featured in: Winter Quotes

3. “I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.”

— Edith Sitwell

4. “Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.”

— Edith Sitwell

5. “The public will believe anything, so long as it is not founded on truth.”

— Edith Sitwell

6. “My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.”

— Edith Sitwell

7. “I am not eccentric. It’s just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.”

— Edith Sitwell

8. “Still falls the rain – dark as the world of man, black as our loss – blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.”

— Edith Sitwell

9. “My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.”

— Edith Sitwell

10. “I have never, in all my life, been so odious as to regard myself as ‘superior’ to any living being, human or animal. I just walked alone – as I have always walked alone.”

— Edith Sitwell

11. “My temper is not spoilt. I am absolutely non-homicidal. Nor do I ever attack unless I have been attacked first, and then Heaven have mercy upon the attacker, because I don’t! I just sharpen my wits on a wooden head as a cat sharpens its claws on the wood legs of a table.”

— Edith Sitwell

12. “Virginia Woolf, I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her ’a beautiful little knitter.”

— Edith Sitwell

13. “Eccentricity is not, as some would believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.”

— Edith Sitwell

14. “Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.”

— Edith Sitwell

15. “Why not be oneself? That is the whole secret of a successful appearance. If one is a greyhound why try to look like a Pekinese?”

— Edith Sitwell

16. “Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity...”

— Edith Sitwell

17. “Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning. Rhythm was described by Schopenhauer as melody deprived of its pitch.”

— Edith Sitwell

18. “Winter is the time for comfort – it is the time for home.”

— Edith Sitwell

19. “I am an unpopular electric eel in a pool of catfish.”

— Edith Sitwell

20. “If one is a greyhound, why try to look like a Pekingese?”

— Edith Sitwell

21. “Vulgarity is, in reality, nothing but a modern, chic, pert descendant of the goddess Dullness.”

— Edith Sitwell

22. “I’m dying, but otherwise I’m in very good health.”

— Edith Sitwell

23. “One’s own surroundings means so much to one, when one is feeling miserable.”

— Edith Sitwell

24. “Picasso was a delightful, kindly, friendly, simple little man. When I met him he was extremely excited and overjoyed that his mother-in-law had just died, and he was looking forward to the funeral.”

— Edith Sitwell

25. “As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”

— Edith Sitwell

26. “All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart...”

— Edith Sitwell

27. “The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”

— Edith Sitwell

28. “The child and the great artist – these alone receive the sensation fresh as it was at the beginning of the world.”

— Edith Sitwell

29. “What an artist is for is to tell us what we see but do not know that we see.”

— Edith Sitwell

30. “A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.”

— Edith Sitwell

31. “Rhythm is one of the principal translators between dream and reality.”

— Edith Sitwell

32. “I’m afraid I’m being an awful nuisance.”

— Edith Sitwell

33. “Said the Sun to the Moon-’When you are but a lonely white crone, And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood, Remember only this of our hopeless love That never till Time is done Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.”

— Edith Sitwell

34. “When we think of cruelty, we must try to remember the stupidity, the envy, the frustration from which it has arisen.”

— Edith Sitwell

35. “Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.”

— Edith Sitwell

36. “Another little drink wouldn’t do us any harm.”

— Edith Sitwell

37. “Poetry is the deification of reality.”

— Edith Sitwell

38. “By ‘happiness’ I do not mean worldly success or outside approval, though it would be priggish to deny that both these things are most agreeable. I mean the inner consciousness, the inner conviction that one is doing well the thing that one is best fitted to do by nature.”

— Edith Sitwell

39. “What is the special privilege of youth? It is, I think, the power of looking forward, the firm belief that the future holds something that is worth possessing, and that, therefore, one can let the present moment drop from one without regret and without fear.”

— Edith Sitwell

40. “Hot water is my native element. I was in it as a baby, and I have never seemed to get out of it ever since.”

— Edith Sitwell

41. “I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.”

— Edith Sitwell

42. “All great art contains an element of the irrational.”

— Edith Sitwell

43. “The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.”

— Edith Sitwell

44. “I’m not the man to balk at a low smell, I not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.”

— Edith Sitwell

45. “I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.”

— Edith Sitwell

46. “In private life she was not in the least what her calumniators would have wished her to be. She was very quiet, had a great natural dignity, and was extremely intelligent. She was also exceedingly sensitive.”

— Edith Sitwell

47. “I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.”

— Edith Sitwell

48. “White as a winding sheet, Masks blowing down the street: Moscow, Paris London, Vienna all are undone. The drums of death are mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, Mumbling, rumbling, and tumbling, The world’s floors are quaking, crumbling and breaking.”

— Edith Sitwell

49. “Tall windows show Infinity; And, hard reality, The candles weep and pry and dance Like lives mocked at by Chance. The rooms are vast as Sleep within; When once I ventured in, Chill Silence, like a surging sea, Slowly enveloped me.”

— Edith Sitwell

50. “If certain critics and poetasters had their way, ‘Ordinary Piety’ and its child, Dullness, would be the masters of poetry.”

— Edith Sitwell