Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."
Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
Earth, receive an honored guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.
An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.
And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
Like love we don't know where or why Like love we cant compel or fly Like Love we often weep Like Love we seldom keep
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting; he must also believe it to be true.
August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay; If I could tell you I would let you know.
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse's flowers will not last; Nurses to their graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.
A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.
Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire; Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.