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.
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
I don’t think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.