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.

Wisdom not only gets, but once got, retains.

But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made...

The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals – its philosophers, its...

The Public – a thing I cannot help looking upon as an enemy, and which I cannot address without feelings of hostility.

No hero is mortal till he dies.

The ground swell is what’s going to sink you as well as being what buoys you up. These are cliches also, of course, and I’m sometimes interested in how much one can get away with.

Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them.

Just when I think I have learned the way to live, life changes.

The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite’s dinner, yet the whole world is not sufficient for it.

It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one.

And old affront will stir the heart Through years of rankling pain.

Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever.

Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.

It is not what I do, it is the way I do it, that will get me in the end.

My mind’s my kingdom.

Why not upset the apple cart? If you don’t, the apples will rot anyway.

The earliest records of our species point to group organizations – the primitive horde, nomadic tribes, settlements, communities, cities, nations.

I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.

You own a watch the invention of the mind, though for a single motion ’tis designed, as well as that which is with greater thought with various springs, for various motions wrought.

I’m sure 50 percent of television ads use rhyme.

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

I wish thee as much pleasure in the reading, as I had in the writing.

Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past.

There are a few people, but a diminishing number, who still believe that Marxism, as an economic system, off era a coherent alternative to capitalism, and socialism has, indeed, triumphed in one country.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

The other side of it is that, despite all that, people reach out to poetry at the key moments in their lives.

Something that required the best of you has ended. You will miss it.

Negative feedback is better that none. I would rather have a man hate me than overlook me. As long as he hates me I make a difference.

A man’s conscience, like a warning line on the highway, tells him what he shouldn’t do — but it does not keep him from doing it.

It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place.

How gently rock yon poplars high Against the reach of primrose sky With heaven’s pale candles stored.

The poetry of earth is never dead:

The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

An angry man opens his mouth and shuts his eyes.

No cross no crown.

Maybe a person’s time would be as well spent raising food as raising money to buy food.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel.

The heart of standing is you cannot fly.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

To err is human (to forgive divine).

Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his...

Fear nothing but what thy industry may prevent; be confident of nothing but what fortune cannot defeat; it is no less folly to fear what is impossible to be avoided than to be secure when...

Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in...

These groups within a society can he distinguished according as to whether, like an army or an orchestra, they function as a single body; or whether they are united merely to defend their common interests...

You are always new, The last of your kisses was ever the sweetest.

Art is born of humiliation.

The teachers I had myself, the best of them were quite extraordinary, and really did inspire one into reading, or indeed, writing.