“She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.”

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

I can’t talk you in terms of time –your time and my time are different

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor – the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

Innocence is a kind of insanity.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector.

People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.

I don’t really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn’t create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

Life is the application of noble and profound ideas to life.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who wilfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed.

Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result either of vulgar careerism or of a poet trying to keep his hand in. Most poets are dead by their late twenties.

Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves.