If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.
We should not confuse information with knowledge.
Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.
With out some kind of god, man is not very intresting.
We have all our private terrors, our particular shadows, our secret fears. We are afraid in a fear which we cannot face, which none understands, and our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, ourselves the last.
It has frequently been said that we never desire what we think absolutely inapprehensible: it is however true that some of our sharpest agonies are those in which the object of desire is regarded as both possible and imaginary.
To become what you are not, behave as you do not.
Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.
When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy.
Talent imitates, genius steals.
I must say Bernard Shaw is greatly improved by music.
Tradition: how the vitality of the past enriches the life of the present.
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.
You can evade life, but you can not evade Death.
At the beach – time you enjoyed wasting, is not wasted.
If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.
People find a way in which they can say something.
When comparing works of art, it is important that the art itself, and not the artists, be considered.
The sense of wellbeing! Its often with us When we are young, but then it’s not noticed; And by the time one has grown to consciousness It comes less often.
I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.