The man who in this world can keep the whiteness of his soul is not likely to lose it in any other.

But you’d have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure; men love in haste but they detest at leisure.

In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why...

The sea complains upon a thousand shores.

A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest.

I am sure of nothing so little as my own intentions.

The saddest thing that befalls a soul Is when it loses faith in God and woman.

I don’t care whether a book is a first edition or not. I’m not a bibliophile in that word’s natural sense.

All farewells should be sudden, when forever.

Romances I ne’er read like those I have seen.

It’s like breathing in and out to me. It’s like having a conversation with someone who isn’t there. Because it has to be addressed to somebody – not a particular person, or very rarely.

Death is the ugly fact which Nature has to hide, and she hides it well.

All I write about is what’s happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about.

Nothing can confound a wise man more than laughter from a dunce.

Wives in their husbands’ absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.

I don’t think of myself all the time.

Her great merit is finding out mine – there is nothing so amiable as discernment.

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

People haven’t got the interest in long long works these days. A lack of interest which I share.

If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes...

All those authors there, most of whom of course I’ve never met. That’s the poetry side, that’s the prose side, that’s the fishing and miscellaneous behind me. You get an affection for books that you’ve...

The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less,...

I find it’s impossible for me to read Proust.

I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among the creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of...

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

The nineteenth century novels came from a time when there was no television and people had time to read novels in three volumes.

If the egotist is weak, his egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a possession of the race.

And if they haven’t got poetry in them, there’s nothing you can do that will produce it.

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

I slept and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty.

I just didn’t want to shoot other people.

The most ancient anchors are laid to have been of stone, and sometimes of wood, to which a great quantity of lead was usually fixed.

Christmas is the day that holds all time together.

Opinions are made to be changed or how is truth to be got at?

There are books up there I haven’t read for many years but I wouldn’t put them out. I never know when I might want to read them again.

A man doesn’t plant a tree for himself. He plants it for posterity.

And in a way, that’s been a help to me, because I take great passions for a particular poet – sometimes it lasts for many years, sometimes only for a while. This happens to everybody.

I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff-box from an emperor.

Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.

I never think about poetry except when I’m writing it. I mean my poetry.

How deeply seated in the human heart is the liking for gardens and gardening.

Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.

There are some friends you don’t meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it’s as if no twenty years has happened – you’re lucky when that happens. I feel the same about...

Everything is sweetened by risk.

And it’s impossible for me to read Henry James.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.