Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.

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.

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there’s a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that’s genuinely goodFrom one...

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two:...

All I have is a voice.

I will love you forever” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. “I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday” – Is that still as easy?

In accepting and defending the social institution of slavery, the Greeks were harder-hearted than we but clearer-headed; they knew that labor as such is slavery, and that no man can feel a personal pride in...

A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.

The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or...

I know nothing, except what everyone knows – if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

To read is to translate, for no two persons’ experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to...

If equal affection cannot be,Let the more loving one be me.

O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good — we are all here on earth to help others:...

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

Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun,...

All we are not stares back at what we are.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

I may want to sleep with Miss America, but I have no wish to hear her talk about herself and her family.

As for Iago’s jealousy, one cannot believe that a seriously jealous man could behave towards his wife as Iago behaves towards Emilia, for the wife of a jealous husband is the first person to suffer....

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.

The More Loving OneLooking up at the stars, I know quite wellThat, for all they care, I can go to hell,But on earth indifference is the leastWe have to dread from man or beast.How should...

In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise

The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.

In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision...

My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven at one a.m.To love you till I die?Earth meets too many crimesFor fibs to interest her;If I...

The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.

And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.

What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?

I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.

A.E.Housman’No one, not even Cambridge was to blame(Blame if you like the human situation):Heart-injured in North London, he becameThe Latin Scholar of his generation.Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,Kept tears like dirty postcards in a drawer;Food...

In the detective story, as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it...

Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty.

Drama is based on the Mistake.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.