Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
I always think a great speaker convinces us not by force of reasoning, but because he is visibly enjoying the beliefs he wants us to accept.
My temptation is quiet. Here at life’s end Neither loose imagination Nor the mill of the mind Consuming its rag and bone, Can make the truth known.
I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say. Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
There is only one romance the Soul’s.
We poets would die of loneliness but for women, and we choose our men friends that we may have somebody to talk about women with. Letter to Olivia Shakespeare, 1936.
Hammer your thoughts into unity.
Not a man alive has so much luck that he can play with it.
Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labor of its unfamiliar thought.
Neither Christ nor Buddha nor Socrates wrote a book, for to do so is to exchange life for a logical process.
His element is so fine Being sharpened by his death, To drink from the wine-breath While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
Consume my heart away, sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is, and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
It was my first meeting with a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations and seemed at once logical and boundless.
In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness.
Farewell – farewell, For I am weary of the weight of time.
The Father and His angelic hierarchy That made the magnitude and glory there Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.
That toil of growing up; The ignominy of boyhood; the distress Of boyhood changing into man; The unfinished man and his pain.
No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority.
The poet is a good citizen turned inside out.