Poetry makes nothing happen.

Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future; impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past; neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time...

The friends who met here and embraced are gone,Each to his own mistake;

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (Nietzsche.)A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration...

Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.

He is the Way.Follow Him through the Land of Unlikeness;You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.He is the Truth.Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.He is the Life.Love Him in the World of the Flesh;And at your marriage all its...

Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.

All the rest is silenceOn the other side of the wall;And the silence ripeness,And the ripeness all.

To save your world, you asked this man to die:Would this man, could he see you now, asked why?

The religious definition of truth is not that it is universal but that it is absolute.

There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.For nothing now can ever come to any good.

The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two...

Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,And shares our bed and eats at our own table ….

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot readThe hunter’s waking thoughts.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

I have never, I think, wanted to ‘belong’ to a group whose interests were not mine, nor have I resented exclusion. Why should thet accept me? All I have ever asked is that others should go their way and let me go mine.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

If you want romance, fuck a journalist.

Coleridge’s description of Iago’s actions as “motiveless malignancy” applies in some degree to all the Shakespearian villains. The adjective motiveless means, firstly, that the tangible gains, if any, are clearly not the principal motive, and, secondly, that the motive is not the desire for personal revenge upon another for a personal injury. Iago himself proffers...

Say this city has ten million souls,Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

And maps can really point to placesWhere life is evil now:Nanking. Dachau.

Funeral BluesStop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,Silence the pianos and with muffled drumBring out the coffin, let the mourners come.Let aeroplanes circle moaning overheadScribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,Let the traffic policemen...

Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence;Gide, though I didn’t know it then, gave part.They taught me to express my deep abhorrenceIf I caught anyone preferring ArtTo Life and Love and being Pure-in-heart.I lived with crooks but seldom was molested;The Pure-in-heart can never be arrested.

The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.

You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

After Portia has trapped Shylock through his own insistence upon the letter of the law of Contract, she produces another law by which any alien who conspires against the life of a Venetian citizen forfeits his goods and places his life at the Doge’s mercy. […] Shakespeare, it seems to me, was willing to introduce...

The Ogre does what ogres can,Deeds quite impossible for Man,But one prize is beyond his reach:The Ogre cannot master speech.About a subjugated plain,Among it’s desperate and slain,The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,While drivel gushes from his lips.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, ‘I know what I like,’ he is really saying ‘I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.

Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad...

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the brightAnd darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night.Accurate scholarship canUnearth the whole offenceFrom Luther until nowThat has driven a culture...

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account.

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.

No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number believe their wish has been granted.

Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when...

A child’s reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether...

Lay your sleeping head, my love,Human on my faithless arm;

We would rather be ruined than changedWe would rather die in our dreadThan climb the cross of the momentAnd let our illusions die.

Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another.Two men, dressed as city employees, block off a busy street and start digging it up....

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

no poet can know what his poem is going to be like until he has written it.

Hunger allows no choiceTo the citizen or the police;We must love one another or die.