top of page
Quotes by Poet

"The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it, because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator, something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's."

"Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse."

"Loveliest of lovely things are they on earth that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour is prized beyond the sculptured flower."

"The poor peasant here hives under conditions quite different from those of Russia. Though often terrible, they are not as appalling as they were there."

"Nature's great masterpiece, an elephant; the only harmless great thing."

"Take everything easy and quit dreaming and brooding and you will be well guarded from a thousand evils."
Will,

"If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you must look forward, do so prayerfully. However, the wisest thing you can do is be present in the present... gratefully."

"We feel unsatisfied until we know ourselves akin even with that greatness which made the spots on which it rested hallowed; and until, by our own lives, and by converse with the thoughts they have bequeathed us, we feel that union and relationship of the spirit which we seek."

"Always carry a corkscrew and the wine shall provide itself."

"Where there are friends there is wealth."

"Did you know I staged the first performance in America of At the Hawk's Well?"

"Perhaps it is of more value to infuriate philosophers than to go along with them."

"Become dangerously open to all points of view. Are you dangerously open, or safely closed?"

"The ability to forgive is one of man's greatest achievements."

"Your pain is a divine rite of passage through which you will be reborn as a being of strength, wisdom and purpose."


"The decision for me was whether to have "The Father" be a book that told a story - from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter - without, as in the earlier books, then having a section on something else and a section on something else."

"It is very wicked for you not to take care of your masters goods, but how much worse is it to pilfer and steal from them, whenever you think you shall not be found out."
Care,

"But inner experience is only one source of human knowledge."

"Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly."

"Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar?"
bottom of page