Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A poem should not mean but be.
A world ends when its metaphor has died.
Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
Writers . . . write to give reality to experience.
They also live Who swerve and vanish in the river.
A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.
Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
A self-advertising writer is always a self-extinguished writer.
Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames.
America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man.
We have no choice but to be guilty. God is unthinkable if we are innocent.
We have learned the answers, all the answers: it is the question that we do not know.
What once was cuddled must learn to kiss The cold wonn's mouth. That's all the mystery.
If God is God He is not good, if God is good He is not God; take the even, take the odd.
Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing.
The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.
If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defence are silent.
What is more important in a library than anything else-than everything else-is the fact that it exists.
Around, around the sun we go: The moon goes round the earth. We do not die of death: We die of vertigo.
There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.
Beauty is that Medusa's head which men go armed to seek and sever, and dead will starve and sting forever.
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.
What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice.
There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
The only thing about a man that is a man . . . is his mind. Everything else you can find in a pig or a horse.
Piety's hard enough to take among the poor who have to practice it. A rich man's piety stinks. It's insufferable.
Poetry which owes no man anything, owes nevertheless one debt - an image of the world in which men can again believe.
The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
The task of man is not to discover new worlds, but to discover his own world in terms of human comprehension and beauty.
The roots of the grass strain, Tighten, the earth is rigid, waits-he is waiting- And suddenly, and all at once, the rain!
Without guilt / What is a man? An animal, isn't he? / A wolf forgiven at his meat, / A beetle innocent in his copulation.
Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
We are as great as our belief in human liberty - no greater. And our belief in human liberty is only ours when it is larger than ourselves.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world.
Children know the grace of god better than most of us. They see the world the way the morning brings it back to them; new and born and fresh and wonderful.
There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream.
That peculiar disease of intellectuals, that infatuation with ideas at the expense of experience, that compels experience to conform to bookish expectations.
The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.