All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is therefore not at all a desirable quality in a chief of state.
The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.
The most important truths are likely to be those which society at that time least wants to hear.
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow.
The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
It’s usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.
All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
I’m always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive – it’s so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
To be free is often to be lonely.
Life is a picnic on a precipice.
The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.