“I was thinking, “So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.”

She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.

Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes.

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

Well, we’ve been lucky devils both And there is no need for a pledge or oath To bind our lovely friendship fast, By firmer stuff Close bound enough.

Originally marriage meant the sale of a woman by one man to another; now most women sell themselves though they have no intention of delivering the goods listed in the bill of sale.

One smile relieves a heart that grieves.

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

Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony.

There is one story and one story only.

She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.

Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.

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.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists; though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

Love is a universal migraine. A bright stain on the vision, Blotting out reason.

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.

If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I’d store up no virtue For Heaven’s distant plain, I’d live at ease as I did please And sin once again.

Secrecy is the foundation of politics.

The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.

The methods it employs with such acumen, persistency, and secrecy are employed by all sorts of business men, from corner grocers up to bankers. If exposed, they are excused on the ground that this is business.

We see with what keenness and zeal the frivolous business of Freemasons is conducted, by persons knit together by the secrecy of their union.

For thus it is better secured from the oppression of the ruling powers, and because this secrecy gives a greater zest to the whole.

The only ones to profit from illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing are the owners of the fishing fleets who remain hidden behind veils of corporate secrecy.

I was thinking, “So, I’m Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I’ll be able to make people read my books now.

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