“It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”
“Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”
“Our emotions are only ''incidents in the effort to keep day and night together.”
“Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.”
“Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.”
“Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”
“War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.”
“The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
“What we know of other people's only our memory of the moments during which we knew them.”
“For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice.”
“An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.”
“If you haven't the strength to impose your own terms upon life, you must accept the terms it offers you.”
“Time past and time future what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present.”
“When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences.”
“It seems just possible that a poem might happen to a very young man: but a poem is not poetry --That is a life.”
“Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.”
“I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.”
“It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.”
“A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good.”
“We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.”
“Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them.”
“Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
“For every life and every act consequence of good and evil can be shown and as in time results of many deeds are blended so good and evil in the end become confounded.”
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
“So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.”
“Think not forever of yourselves, O Chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of continuing generations of our families, think of our grandchildren and of those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.”
“We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.”
“There are flood and drought over the eyes and in the mouth, dead water and dead sand contending for the upper hand. The parched eviscerate soil gapes at the vanity of toil, laughs without mirth. This is the death of the earth.”
“I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.”