“I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.”

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Style … is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it.

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time.

Now the great winds shoreward blow Now the salt tides seaward flow Now the wild white horses play Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.

Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood; One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.

How many minds–almost all the great ones–were formed in secrecy and solitude!

Weep bitterly over the dead, for he is worthy, and then comfort thyself; drive heaviness away: thou shall not do him good, but hurt thyself.

All the live murmur of a summer’s day.

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

America is not just a country, it’s an idea.

In ways that synchronize images, ideas, emotions, sounds, smells, ignorance, and knowledge.

Conservative values aren’t really reflected in the radical values of the NRA. And the other idea was that the NRA is not what you think it is

My advice to female directors is not to wait until you feel like your ideas have been pre-certified or until you think you’ve gotten some approval for them.

It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.

Be conscious first of thyself within, then think and act. All living thought is a world in preparation; all real act is a thought manifested. The material world exists because an idea began to play in divine self–consciousness.

Creativity gives hope that there can be a worthwhile idea.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that.