Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
The majority of poems one outgrows and outlives, as one outgrows and outlives the majority of human passions.
Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry -That is a life.
The destination cannot be described; / You will know very little until you get there; / You will journey blind.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god-sullen, untamed and intractable.
Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste and end by debauching it.
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.
Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of self.
No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the Voice.
Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of flame Which human power cannot remove.
We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.
We know too much, and are convinced of too little. Our literature is a substitute for religion, and so is our religion.
All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
Sister, mother And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.
I believe the moment of birth Is when we have knowledge of death I believe the season of birth Is the season of sacrifice.
When the gods know that a god hath fallen, With this kindly feeling They do encourage him-- Be thou a god again and again.
To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.
Before a cat will condescend to treat you as a trusted friend, some little token of esteem is needed, like a dish of cream.
Here between the hither and the farther shore While time is withdrawn, consider the future And the past with an equal mind.
Turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod goodbye to Rochefoucauld, If the street were time and he as the end of the street.
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.
So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore.
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Those who talk of the bible as a monument of English prose are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.
Between the desire And the spasm, Between the potency And the existence, Between the essence And the descent, Falls the Shadow.
Any religion is forever in danger of petrifaction into mere ritual and habit, though ritual and habit be essential to religion.
It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and ecstasy is too much pain.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well/ By the purification of the motive/ In the ground of our beseeching
But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
Signs are taken for wonders. / 'We would see a sign!' / The word within a word, unable to speak a word, / Swaddled with darkness.
I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.
I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.