Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life

Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ”shaggy dog” stories; they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.

Let mortals beware of wordsFor with words we lieCan speak peaceWhen we mean warBut song is trueLet music for peaceBe the paradigmFor peace means changeAt the right time

lay your faithless head upon my arm

A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scientist; he is either, like the surgeon, a craftsman, or, like the physician and the psychologist,...

Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say

Only those in the last stage of disease could believe that children are true judges of character.

We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don’t know

If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.

How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve. No...

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content/ That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;/ When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.

To ask the hard question is simple

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

Now is the age of anxiety.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one...

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good

It takes little talent to see what lies under one’s nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible, it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.

Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places.

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it

You know there are no secrets in America. It’s quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges / To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma.

‘Healing,” Papa would tell me, ”is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

But in my arms till break of dayLet the living creature lie,Mortal, guilty, but to meThe entirely beautiful.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the...

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.

Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do.

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep

Look, stranger, at this island now / The leaping light for your delight discovers.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.

If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me

Within these breakwaters English is spoken; without / Is the immense, improbable atlas.

If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please don’t raise your hands because I am also nearsighted.

But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime:’O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.

In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere....

In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them...

Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

One tapped my shoulder and asked me `How did you fall, sir?’ / Whereat I awakened.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention –on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God. ....

Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.

The nightingales are sobbing in / The orchards of our mothers, / And hearts that we broke long ago / Have long been breaking others.

I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a ”suspension of belief.” A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be...

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; but among those whom I love, I can: all of them can make me laugh.