The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade.
All the literati keep An imaginary friend.
Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.
Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.
A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
For time is inches And the heart’s changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty’s conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock.
Why doesn’t the United States take over the monarchy and unite with England? England does have important assets. Naturally the longer you wait, the more they will dwindle. At least you could use it for a summer resort instead of Maine.
Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral.