In the mountains, there you feel free.
Disillusion can become itself an illusion If we rest in it.
People exercise an unconscious selection in being influenced.
If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still. Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
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.
Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation.
Art is the escape from personality.
We learn what poetry is – if we ever learn – by reading it.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
My greatest trouble is getting the curtain up and down.
Good poets borrow, great poets steal.
It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.
Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.
Everyone gets the experience. Some get the lesson.
Maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man, experiencing new emotions appropriate to one’s age, and with the same intensity as the emotions of youth.
In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unfinished vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings.
The circle of our understanding is a very restricted area.
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.