Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they’ve realised they can’t get away with it.
Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
Poetry is the only art people haven’t learned to consume like soup.
But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer “writer” for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer “poetry” would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.
Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he’ll escape.
One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who’s untrue to his wife.
We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn’t know who he is and the latter does.
The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place;.
Words have no word for words that are not true.
Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood; But noble platitudes – ah, there’s a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that’s genuinely good From one that’s base but merely has succeeded.
The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.
Lovers have lived so long with giants and elves, they won’t believe again in their own size.
O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.