“If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.”

Truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it.

Did not one spend the first half of one’s days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?

I am little concerned with beauty or perfection. I don’t care for the great centuries. All I care about is life, struggle, intensity.

If you shut up truth, and bury it underground, it will but grow.

These young people naturally grow up with ideas different from ours, for they are born for times when we shall no longer be here

Why then should money be blamed for all the dirt and crimes it causes? For is love less filthy – love which creates life?

Over all crowds there seems to float a vague distress, an atmosphere of pervasive melancholy, as if any large gathering of people creates an aura of terror and pity.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

Art for me…is a negation of society, an affirmation of the individual, outside of all the rules and all the demands of society.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

Blow the candle out, I don’t need to see what my thoughts look like.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

The conclusion does not belong to the artist.

If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.

Paris flared – Paris, which the divine sun had sown with light, and where in glory waved the great future harvest of Truth and of Justice.

It is not I who am strong, it is reason, it is truth.

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.

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

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

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

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.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and – if he is lucky enough – know the love of an honest woman.

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

The butterfly, a cabbage-white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight.