Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.