"I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics."

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."

"Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same."

"I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing."

"In my end is my beginning."

"Our second danger is to associate tradition with the immovable; to think of it as something hostile to all change; to aim to return to some previous condition which we imagine as having been capable of preservation in perpetuity, instead of aiming to stimulate the life which produced that condition in its time. . . . a tradition without intelligence is not worth having . . ."

"A toothache, or a violent passion, is not necessarily diminished by our knowledge of its causes, its character, its importance or insignificance."

"But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things: liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things."

"Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry."

"No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."

"What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living."

"A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good."

"People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced."

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

"Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My words echothus, in your mind."

"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."

"Home is where one starts from."

"I had seen birth and death but had thought they were different."

"For he will doAs he do doAnd there's no doing anything about it!"

"When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city ?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?�What will you answer? "We all dwell togetherTo make money from each other�? or "This is a community�?Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions."

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."

"Birth copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks."

"Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow."

"Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity."

"The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."

"There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him."

"Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself."

"Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach your goal,Your imagined paradise of success and grandeur,You will find your past failures waiting there to greet you."

"Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question..."

"If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you."

"What is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place."

"Our difficulties of the moment must always be dealt with somehow, but our permanent difficulties are difficulties of every moment."

"Business today consists in persuading crowds."

"The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first."

"Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird meaning death."

"Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood."

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

"With Cats, some say, one rule is true: Don't speak till you are spoken to. Myself, I do not hold with that -I say, you should ad-dress a Cat.But always keep in mind that heResents familiarity.I bow, and taking off my hat,Ad-dress him in this form: O Cat!But if he is the Cat next door,Whom I have often met before(He comes to see me in my flat)I greet him with an oopsa Cat!I think I've heard them call him James -But we've not got so far as names."

"We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly."

"Politic, cautious, and meticulous;full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse."

"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both."

"The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours."

"Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly."

"To do the useful thing to say the courageous thing to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life."

"There are three conditions which often look alikeYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachmentFrom self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference, ... ."

"As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing."

"All cases are unique and very similar to others."

"Humor is also a way of saying something serious."

"It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves."

"Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express."