"Small tyrants, threatened by big,sincerely believethey love liberty."

"Clear, unscalable, aheadRise the Mountains of Instead,From whose cold, cascading streamsNone may drink except in dreams."

"In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one."

"The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable."

"In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise."

"In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism."

"The true men of action in our time those who transform the world are not the politicians and statesmen but the scientists. Unfortunately poetry cannot celebrate them because their deeds are concerned with things, not persons, and are therefore speechless. When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes."

"When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu."

"Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel."

"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."

"So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing; but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises."

"It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it."

"Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession."

"It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen."

"O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start;You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart."

"Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

"I will love you forever' swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. 'I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday' - Is that still as easy?"

"There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children."

"You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart."

"A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us."

"Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind."

"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."

"Cathedrals Luxury liners laden with souls Holding to the east their hulls of stone."

"Learn from your dreams what you lack."

"Follow, poet, follow rightTo the bottom of the night,With your unconstraining voiceStill persuade us to rejoice;With the farming of a verseMake a vineyard of the curse,Sing of human unsuccessIn a rapture of distress;In the deserts of the heartLet the healing fountain start,In the prison of his daysTeach the free man how to praise."

"The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition."

"Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith."

"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."

"History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology."

"Drama is based on the Mistake. I think someone is my friend when he really is my enemy, that I am free to marry a woman when in fact she is my mother, that this person is a chambermaid when it is a young nobleman in disguise, that this well-dressed young man is rich when he is really a penniless adventurer, or that if I do this such and such a result will follow when in fact it results in something very different. All good drama has two movements, first the making of the mistake, then the discovery that it was a mistake."

"Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes - ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded."

"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

"Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say."

"Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest."

"God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich."

"It is nonsense to speak of 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. To a hungry man it is rightly more important that he eat than that he philosophize."

"We are, for all our polish, of littlestature, and, as human lives,compared with authentic martyrs,of no account."

"Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered."

"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 choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be."

"If we really want to live we'd better start at once to try."

"My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain."

"Always the following wind of historyOf others' wisdom makes a buoyant airTill we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seemAbrupt, untrained, competing with no lieOur fathers shouted once."

"All we are not stares back at what we are."

"What living occasion can,Be just to the absent?"

"Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one."

"If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me."

"There must always be two kinds of art: escape-art, for man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep, and parable-art, that art which shall teach man to unlearn hatred and learn love."

"Nobody can honestly think of himself as a strong character because however successful he may be in overcoming them he is necessarily aware of the doubts and temptations that accompany every important choice."

"Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell."

"Art is born of humiliation."