Truth on our level is a different thing from truth for the jellyfish.

Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The journey not the arrival matters.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree / In the cool of the day.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in.

We must believe that ”emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from...

A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse

To country people Cows are mild,And flee from any stick they throw;But I’m a timid town bred child,And all the cattle seem to know.

Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.

Webster was much possessed by death / And saw the skull beneath the skin.

Tenants of the house, / Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different.

I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

LightLightThe visible reminder of Invisible Light.

So I find words I never thought to speakIn streets I never thought I should revisitWhen I left my body on a distant shore.

Old Deuteronomy’s lived a long time; He’s a cat who has lived many lives in succession. He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme a long while before Queen Victoria’s accession. Old Deuteronomy’s buried...

The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror.

Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take stone from stone and wash them.

Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.

People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.

We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices, whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats’ feet over broken glassIn our dry cellarShape without...

In this brief transit where the dreams crossThe dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these thingsFrom the wide window towards the granite shoreThe white sails still...

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

There are three conditions which often look alikeYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachmentFrom self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them,...

All cases are unique and very similar to others.

It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

It’s not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.

Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

…to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening...

There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth....

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes...

For I have known them all already, known them all—Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must...

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat:If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse.If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,If you put him in a flat...

When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes.

You are the music while the music lasts.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion...

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information.

We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time.

Poetry, if it is not to be a lifeless repetition of forms, must be constantly exploring “the frontiers of the spirit.” But these frontiers are not like the surveys of geographical explorers, conquered once for...